Our identities online are becoming ever more valuable to the companies that we entrust them to. What happens though when a company just ups and closes shop (Pownce, for example) and deletes your stuff? Sure, the individual files you'll have on your computer anyway, you won't have lost anything as far as bits and bytes are concerned--but what about friendships you've built up with people who you only know through the service. Your data should be portable so that you can take it to any service and not lose those relationships that you've built up in one walled-garden when it collapses, or you decide to move on. OpenID tries to solve this brand-centric problem by placing you at the centre of your data and allowing the sites you trust access through a single sign-on. OSnews is contemplating implementing OpenID and would like your feedback, but there are a few questions to consider--please read on for details
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Member since:
2005-08-12
Information Cards are the single most revolutionary idea in online identity management that the world has seen, and it is not an understatement to say that nobody knows what it is. It's an open standard, but I know of no alternative browsers that support a non-Microsoft implementation. I ran Microsoft's for a while just hoping to, even once, be prompted for an InfoCard, but I never was and it's a WPF application so it uses a few hundred megabytes of RAM just sitting in the background, so I eventually uninstalled it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Card
"Patent promises have been issued by Microsoft, IBM, and others, ensuring that this Information Card technology is freely available to all."