http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b6351e4-c843-11dc-94a6-0000779fd2ac.html

“Each website they go to, [people] have to keep saying who their friends are,” says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. “If instead they had a file of friends, the website would be able to just pick it up: this is me, these are my friends and colleagues, do the right thing.”

The notion of a portable friends list is just part of a broader vision of making many different types of user-specific data portable between websites. That vision got a boost last week after Yahoo, the internet portal, said it would support OpenID, an initiative to develop a common login scheme across websites. The addition of Yahoo’s 248m users will more than triple the number of OpenID accounts.