Updating “The Identity Landscape of 2006”

In her Internet Identity Workshop keynote, Kaliya just referred to my piece “The Digital Identity Landscape of 2006” which I wrote January 11, 2006. She said something to the effect that this represent “the best summary so far that at least part of the community agrees with”.

I’m flattered, but a bit embarrassed, because this diagram is a bit dated, given how many things have happened since: most importantly convergence around OpenID, convergence around OSIS, and convergence between OpenID and SAML. So here is my next attempt at the same triangle (also borrowing a bit from Andre Durand’s evolution of this triangle).

The big differences to the January version are the following:

• The various URL-based technologies (LID, i-names, Yadis, Sxip, XRI, et al) have come together under the OpenID term.
• Microsoft gets a lot of credit for their support of the OSIS project, which brings together most important enterprise software vendors and a number of startups, and thus makes this third column far less Microsoft-controlled than it appeared in January.
• There are various very encouraging signs that the OpenID and SAML/Liberty communities are coming together, allowing the use of SAML in a user-centric manner, which would allow all three columns in a user-centric manner.

This was done in a bit of hurry, so please tell me whether I’m wrong and bear with me if I update it a few times.