Talking Identity

I'm back at work after some much needed R&R, and as always it seems like I missed quite a bit while I was gone. The timing of my vacation meant that I missed last months IIW conference, where one of the main events was to be an identity card interoperability test involving Microsoft, Novell and others involved in the development of identity frameworks. I also missed an announcement from Microsoft regarding four open-source projects it is starting that enables developers on other platforms to adopt its CardSpace technology (read the NetworkWorld article here). The projects provide implementations of the CardSpace identity selector technology for Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP and C.

This move, combined with Microsoft's contribution of the CardSpace technology to the open-source community via OSP (Open Specification Promise) license, underscores their commitment to making the identity metasystem a reality. Interoperability of identity systems is a key requirement to making an internet identity layer a reality, and these two pieces of news show that we are moving closer to a day when we can take our identity with us to different websites, rather than having a different identity for each website.