The OpenID Foundation announced the launch of its first international chapter today to big accolades in Japan. The creation of the Japanese OpenID chapter was participated in by a host of big web companies there and made the front page of Google News Japan. Giant social networking site Mixi also announced that it would soon support OpenID.

OpenID Europe may become the next international chapter of the Foundation. See below for the presentation used to announce the Japanese chapter and a heart warming photo from the event.

David Recordon, Vice-Chair of the OpenID Foundation (pictured below), and Nat Sakimura of the Nomura Research Institute gave the following presentation today. Local organizations interested in starting other international chapters can refer to this page on the Foundation site.

It will be interesting to see if major vendors in Japan are faster to accept inbound OpenID from other providers than vendors in the US. Either way, each announcement like today’s further validates the OpenID protocol and moves the conversation towards more advanced topics regarding user identity.

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Nob Seki (Six Apart), Nat Sakimura (NRI), David Recordon in OpenID-orange (Six Apart), Ishikawa-san (VeriSign)

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