B. Mann Consulting

VeriSign chose OpenID for their new "Personal Identity Provider", aka pip: http://pip.verisignlabs.com/.

I'm a bit confused. OpenID handily does single sign on. But that's it. I can understand not deploying a huge SAML stack -- all of those blogs and web apps that they talk about it in the announcement post have no way of easily interoperating with SAML today, aka lack of scripty language support -- but OpenID is fairly limited today. Be interesting to see if VeriSign will push Simple Registration Protocol and/or extend the OpenID "spec" and/or standardize it in some way as DIX is doing (or merge/interoperate/implement DIX?).

If I were VeriSign, I would follow this up with support for multiple identity protocols -- that is, after all, Canter's Law: work with everything. You could have a single identity hosted by VeriSign and accessible via a variety of protocols, from OpenID to DIX to SAML to InfoCard.

It certainly is great to see experimentation actually starting to happen in this space. At the Mesh conference, which I've just come back from, I heard some rumours about a potential 10M profile installation of DIX. Exciting times...

I didn't get nearly as much time (hardly any!) to talk to Ton Zylstra at BarCamp Amsterdam as I would have liked to. He's continuing the conversation on his blog, with this post about P2P social networking:

I would like to have a true peer to peer social networking platform. Also I'd like to have my own spiders and agents.

FOAF isn't ready for this kind of thing I think, but we might look to an existing p2p infrastructure like Skype to be a carrier. Boris Mann pretty much repeatedly said Jabber can do anything during BarCamp, and seemed to be only half joking. Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: How to Get P2P Social Networking

You're right, Ton, I was only half joking. I think real time is very important. If the "IM Wars" have shown us anything, it's that we need to have common standards and formats. For XML message passing, including IM, Jabber is the answer to this (and might be the answer for voice and video as well, but I've got more to write about this later).