I don't think this blogger actually read the post by Google. The neosmart article emphasizes This is a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0. This is because Google is following the OpenID 2.0 protocol which does contain the discovery request and the XRDS document process.

http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0.html#disco...

This is not a fork from OpenID. They are simply using the newer protocol.