Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

MarcCanter

MarcCanter: Giants must open or die

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Marc Canter has had a glimps into the future of microsoft…

For sure – each of these giants will make their own decisions, in their own due time, but at the end of the day – if they don’t open up – they’ll eventually lose their customer.
At least we have a way to connect these giant worlds together (and take us small little fry along for the ride at the same time.) That’s a huge breakthough and is the foundation of us building the distributed web infrastructure. What I’ve been chanting about is our own Open Source Infrastructure and the other kinds of open standards we need…..
StructuredBlogging.org is an attempt to keep all the various formats of microcontent compatible. Our upcoming PeopleAggregator APIs will provide basic social networking capabilities – to all – and a way of inter-connecting disparate social networks into one giant distrbuted mesh.

The world of media needs standards like Media RSS and one could imagine burgeoning new standards around Tags, Reputation, Events and Musical tastes and preferences.

It is nice to see the itags included in the list of open source infrastructure. Thanks Mark.

Julian Bond was in the audience and immediately complained “they’ll never be a LAMP version of Infocards” – but what I wanted to explain to Julian was that Microsoft is in the business of taking care of themselves, just as Yahoo, Google and AOL are – as well. So don’t expect a Linux version of anything from Microsoft, but you CAN expect meta-identity compatible ID systems for LAMP – that’s for dam sure.

 

Julian don’t be so sure about this statement.

Marc on the Open Web

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Marc Canter’s AlwaysOn article finally is out. Breaking the Web Wide Open!

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs. But like it or not, those walls are tumbling down. Open web standards are being adopted so widely, with such value and impact, that the web giants—Amazon, AOL, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo—are facing the difficult decision of opening up to what they don’t control.

Identity is the first topic covered and he does a great job summarizing:

Right now, you don’t really control your own online identity. At the core of just about every online piece of software is a membership system. Some systems allow you to browse a site anonymously—but unless you register with the site you can’t do things like search for an article, post a comment, buy something, or review it. The problem is that each and every site has its own membership system. So you constantly have to register with new systems, which cannot share data—even you’d want them to. By establishing a “single sign-on” standard, disparate sites can allow users to freely move from site to site, and let them control the movement of their personal profile data, as well as any other data they’ve created.
Identity 2.0 is all about users controlling their own profile data and becoming their own agents. This way the users themselves, rather than other intermediaries, will profit from their ID info. Once developers start offering single sign-on to their users, and users have trusted places to store their data—which respect the limits and provide access controls over that data, users will be able to access personalized services which will understand and use their personal data.
The Initiatives:
Right now, Identity 2.0 is under construction through various efforts from Microsoft (the “InfoCard” component built into the Vista operating system and its “Identity Metasystem”), Sxip Identity, Identity Commons, Liberty Alliance, LID (NetMesh’s Lightweight ID), and SixApart’s OpenID.

More Movers and Shakers:
Identity Commons and Kaliya Hamlin, Sxip Identity and Dick Hardt, the Identity Gang and Doc Searls, Microsoft’s Kim Cameron, Craig Burton, Phil Windley, and Brad Fitzpatrick, to name a few.

People like Gnomdex so there is BAR Camp

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From Marc Canter

Doc and I are doing a panel on the ‘OpenWeb’ so I hope folks come or at least tune-in via webcast or IRC. But the AO conference WILL be propogated by VCs and rich people – and I prefer hanging out with normal people the best.
That’s why I love Gnomedex. I sure hope there’s another one – soon – like at the end of September.

I found this in my list of saved but not posted blog posts. Seems like Marc’s wish is going to come true – BAR Camp is this weekend. I just found out about it from Eugene Kim’s blog (he has been posting some great stuff this past week about wikimania and collaboration patterns). Likely I will go down with Mary and share the demo of i-names sso working on wordpress that I did at DrupalCon in Porland two weeks ago.