If there was one very clear lesson that I took home from this week’s IIW, it is that the "Digital Identity Market" is not actually about digital identity. Instead, it is about relationships.

Bob Blakley of the Burton Group, as so often, made the most elaborate case.

But that’s the same conclusion we came to when a small group of us were trying to brainstorm on other ways in which the digital identity market could reasonably structured or partitioned than just the now slighly dated triangle diagram (and its derivative, the newly published Venn diagram), and the concentric circles diagram.

We didn’t start out that way, but one of the ways of structuring digital identity is by looking at the intensity of the relationship between two parties over time. In the real world, it is very gradual: first, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Then, I might recognize you as having seen you before at some party or other. Then I might know your first name. We might chat a bit and exchange business cards. And so forth.

As a diagram, this would look something like this: