Friday, 20 June 2008

Identity Dialtone vs OpenID

Two recent posts of Mark Dixon about Identity Dialtone and eliminating gossipy cousin mabel metaphorically compare the Plain Old Telephone Service with Identity as a Service. Mark Dixon sais IaaS should follow the characteristics of POTS and that IaaS should be User-Centric.
I'm going a step further then Mark and I'm going to put the name OpenID on it an see if OpenID can match up with POTS and its characteristics.
  • Highly available :OpenID at ISPs will provide High availability
  • Highly reliable: The exisitng internet technologies (see further) are working reliable now, so will OpenID.
  • Highly standard: OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman).
  • Easily recognized: Everybody knows URLs. The OpenID-logo is easily recognizable.
  • Simple to use: Login to your Identity Provider once and start using your OpenID URL
  • Usable: It allows you to login easily. Just use your own URL.
  • Ubiqutous: Here we have a problem.
  • Critical to our daily activities: IaaS itself isn't critical yet, and this is the same for OpenID.
  • So commonplace we take it for granted: URLs are taken for granted.
The ISP could be a good replacement for the Telecom companies as it should only distribute the URLs. There is only one (pretty important) issue regarding this and that's privacy. Should your ISP be in control of all your Digital Identities?