Stephen Downes

This is obviously a major development, and one we've been waiting for. "This is a major development in identity management, and marks the beginning of a serious effort to unite OpenID's distributed identity specification with the CardSpace system developed by Microsoft." If CardSpace is new to you, it is "a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website." Similar plugins are being developed for Mozilla and Safari as well. Now if Google and Yahoo play ball, we have one seamless identity system (I should note that Liberty Alliance is a holdout as well). More at Michael Graves, Scott Kveton (Jan Rain), David Recordon (VeriSign), Brad Fitzpatrick (Six Apart), Kim Cameron (Microsoft), Johannes Ernst (LID), and Dick Hardt (Sxip).