Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I feel like Microsoft (or a politician)

Sxip, Marc Canter and Johannes Ernst have blogged on Liberty's People Service.

All posts are an interesting mix of guarded approval and suspicion.

From the Sxip corporate blog
It will be interesting to see whether this is an open or closed "circle
of trust" approach to IdM for individuals, to what extent it will be
user vs silo-centric, and how complicated it is.
From Marc

I won’t go into the irony of announcing this right after CES and during MacWorld. I wonder if these Liberty people even have a clue what that ruckus is all about.

way - I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just too coolio to be negative about.

From Johannes
I've got to admit that this is not something I would have expected from Liberty ... it runs counter to its traditional reputation ... but I very much like the direction this is going.
While it is definitely gratifying to see respected players see value in the People Service (and hopefully think about how they might work with it), I honestly don't understand why it's seen as such a paradigm shift and/or breakout for Liberty.

Internal to the Alliance, the People Service is very definitely seen as evolution rather than revolution. Whereas with the first version of our Web Services Framework we could deal with transactions involving single identities, with the People Service (as part of the soon to be finalized ID-WSF 2.0) we can now deal with transactions involving two identities. Definitely 'cool io' and interesting but in no way inconsistent with the architecture and philosophy that we've always followed. Just new functionality layered on top of what we already had. Put another way, just another slice of identity that can be shared. And, as before, supporting a range of deployment options, e.g. a People Service on the network, a People Service on a PC, or on a phone.

Guarded approval tempered by suspicion. My mother-in-law would recognize the dynamic.

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