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AOL and 63 Million OpenIDs (from dev.aol.com)

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I'm following up on the OpenID discussion over at dev.aol.com/blog:
Yesterday, I blogged about AOL's work-in-progress on OpenID. It generated a lot of positive commentary.I realized after reading the reactions that I buried the lead: Thereare now 63 million AOL/AIM OpenIDs. Anyone can get one by signing upfor a free AIM account. This is cool.
(full article)

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  1. jgfaughnanFebruary 18, 2007 at 3:35 PM

    I wonder how many of those 63 million are live accounts. I once had an AOL username of jfaughnan, and I find there's an OpenID for it. I suspect that's my old AOL account ... it now a zombie OID. AOL may need a way to clear those out.

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  2. panzerjohnFebruary 18, 2007 at 8:16 PM

    I'm actually just going by external calculations, not internal data, but the 63 million only includes accounts that are "active" in some way -- AOL accounts which are actively used and/or AIM accounts which have logged in at some point over some time period.  Vague, I know, but it definitely rules out the millions of "abandoned" accounts which haven't been used in years -- I think adding those in would bring the total above 100M I think.  All of this is off the top of my head.

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