The clouds are aligning so to speak. Apps are everywhere. The variety of mobile devices connecting to the networks is unprecedented. In the process, identity management is becoming a major issue.
According to a Gartner survey earlier this year, enterprise managers see identity management as a top business priority. That would lead to the conclusion that enterprise operations are considering a variety of identity management options.
Emerging is a growing interest in social identity as a means for employees to sign into external applications.
Google has announced that Yahoo users will now be able to quickly and easily sign up for Google products using their Yahoo email address. The feature, according to some in the industry, will be a boon for Google and OpenID, the Internet standard behind the feature. But what benefit does this provide for Yahoo?
Will making it easier for Yahoo users to sign in to Google - a direct competitor - draw users away from the portal, search and mail provider, or will it help create an overall better user experience? According to Yahoo, making a process that users were already engaged in simpler will provide a better user experience and keep them interested in one of its most solid products - Yahoo Mail.
The team behind Mozilla's Firefox browser announced today the availability of experimental code that website owners can add to their pages to allow site visitors to create an account, log-in or switch users with just a few simple clicks and no password to remember.
The unveiling comes a week after Facebook fired a big shot across the web, staking a claim as the dominant provider of one-click portable identity. These two technologies seem aimed right at each other and engineers at both companies have no doubt been following each others' work closely.
The @ symbol has been added to the prestigious collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the organization announced today. Unlike some other ephemera, the Museum didn't pay a penny for the symbol, nor will it claim exclusive rights to its use.
"It might be the only truly free--albeit not the only priceless--object in our collection," Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, wrote this morning. Why add such an artifact to the collection? Antonelli's explanation is quite artful itself. For social web users, though, the meaning of the symbol is more contentious than the Museum has acknowledged. Isn't good art generally the subject of controversy?
NTT docomo, the telephone provider patronized by approximately half the population of Japan, today linked its mobile identity layer with a general web identity for users through OpenID, according to the OpenID Foundation. NTT docomo users will now be able to quickly and easily log-in to any OpenID supporting website online with the same account credentials they already use in the country's flourishing mobile ecommerce and content ecosystem.
Just when you thought the Identity game was over and Facebook or Twitter had won, now you can welcome 55 million more docomo customers onto the OpenID side of the contest.
Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke - opening his talk with this question: "Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!"
But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site - no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.
If you've been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command - WebFinger - for all Gmail accounts with public profiles. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online.
Top government IT officials and representatives from online identity services met today in Washington DC to talk about plans to allow 3rd party certification bodies, called "Trust Framework Providers," to evaluate private sector OpenID and Info Card providers for use in logging into government agency websites.
The Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop is being held in Washington DC to draft a process for certifying existing identity providers for low-security government authentication transactions (so-called NIST level 1). If the plans move forward, we may someday be able to log in to government sites using our favorite OpenID-supporting website credentials. Google, AOL, Yahoo or other commercial accounts could become new keys to a consistent experience around the .gov web.
The good folks over at Mozilla Labs posted a screencast this morning of an experimental new way to log in to websites while using the Firefox browser. The approach leverages the Mozilla Weave platform, an eighteen month old technology that ties together the local browser experience, with online data stored for users.
The new login method lets users log in to an OpenID supporting site or a traditional username/password site with one or zero clicks. It's a password manager, essentially, but it looks like an especially smooth one from one of the most trusted vendors online. And it syncs with the cloud so you could log in to your browser and then your favorite sites from any computer. It looks real nice.
Yesterday, Google made a major change to the search results page that appears when you search for a person's name. Google Profiles, for people who have set them up, now appear on those pages. Today, Google opened a discussion about Google Profiles and called for voting on ideas about what they include.
Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.
