What OpenID (and the underlying Yadis) fundamentally give us are: Globally unique identifiers (today URLs and XRIs, but there’s no technical reason those couldn’t also be e-mail addresses, barcodes or ISBN numbers) A mechanism for services discovery (via Yadis XRDS, and, in very limited form, via the OpenID HTML tags). Everything else, such as authentication,…

Oracle’s Nishant Kaushik writes: So does user-centricity have a place in the enterprise? I’m not sure. Opening up the enterprise to external identity providers may force the adoption of user-centric technologies, but it won’t mean that once I am "in" the enterprise and have given them access to some data, I can still control how…

In a recent interview, Bob Blakley of the Burton Group, recently was asked about "the most serious problem" interoperable identity is facing. He responded: The most serious question we’re facing – and really it trumps all the others – is “how do identity providers make money”? Now here is a true statement about this budding…

Phil Windley writes about Barbie dolls with embedded keys for Barbie-based social networking, and the obvious (for people with kids …) dynamics of technology adoption that will play out. Sounds like good ol’ PGP key signing parties were simply going after the wrong audience for mass-market success … ;-) (More seriously, there are several lessons…

I hereby do notify the world that I shall not join any form of online service that has any of the following features: Requires me to work out who my friends are. Asks me to approve you as a friend before we can communicate. Sends me an email to tell me someone didn’t send me…