Agree. - Meryn Stol

The race is on as to who will become de-facto identity service standard. The one company that holds the most identities will have a lot of power. The good thing is the competition between many players. Anyone remember the old Microsoft Passport everyone hated? This is all about trust, and competititve services will have to improve security so that more people will choose their service. I hope to see a great consolidation of local site authentication setups to 5-10 major players. Today, security is a lot of work, and only the larger companies have the resources to keep up with criminals. I am involved in creating a self service site for our 400 000 customers, and we hope to allow our customers to choose which service they trust. - Frode Stenstrøm

Frode, hopefully there will not be a de-facto standard, unless it stems from the work being done on OpenID or OAuth. Single points of failure suck, but for identity services it would be a nightmare. I think I feel a blog post coming on... - Rob Diana

About a blog post - agreed :) And I don´t whish for any one vendor to win this race. We use OpenID as a basis for our services, but feel that the way OpenID shown to the end user has much room for improvement. Most are used to username as a word or email address. - Frode Stenstrøm

i still think the right solution is something decentralised - which is why openid is good, in that sense, but not good enough, because it is difficult to take one's main openid away from one provider and switch to another - Iphigenie

I would normally agree with you, but beeing an OpenID provider is quite challenging. Your users put a lot of trust in you keeping your credentials safe. Right now, I think to many companies are trying to be a provider, and to few a openID consumer. I can understand why, but I hope that most websites start to support OpenID. My own hobby site at http://www.s-consulting.no is now testing Facebook connect, but I will allow for most authenication types if time will let me. - Frode Stenstrøm

Hey Rob, I just saw your blog at http://regulargeek.com/2009... on this topic. Forgive me for reposting the link to this discussion, but I found it valuable! - Frode Stenstrøm

FTR this doesn't even work right now - Jesse Stay

Frode, no problem posting the link. I will take whatever publicity I can get. - Rob Diana

Jesse, it is funny how all of that happened so quickly. - Rob Diana

http://www.s-consulting.no/blog... - Frode Stenstrøm

Rob, Yeah - it's like they're trying to prove my point - Jesse Stay