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Infocard is not the son of Passport

  • Статья

Passport was designed to solve two problems:

  1. Identity Provider for MSN: for this pupose, Passport has proven to be useful, catering for 250M+ users and 1 billion logons per day
  2. Identity Provider for the Internet: unsuccessful

The lessons learnt from Passport has contributed towards the formulation of the 7 Laws of Identity (see my past blog). In particular, for a universal identity solution to work well, Law#5 need to be obeyed:

Law #5: Pluralism of Operators and Technologies: A universal identity solution must utilize and enable the interoperation of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.

Now, the Identity Metasystem scenario involves three parties:

  • Subjects - individuals and other entities about whom claims are made
  • Relying Parties - websites that require identities before they serve up information or services
  • Identity Providers - issue identities, able to assert claims about subjects

In this picture, Infocard is simply the UI technology that gives the Subjects the control to send their identities to relying parties across different contexts, while having a consistent user experience.

I believe this time around, we got the design right, and I have faith that the Identity Metasystem vision will solve the Web Identity problem, and hence enabling Web 2.0 innovations to flourish.

Some evidence - Sun has demonstrated interoperability with Infocard at JavaOne through their Tango project; Verisign has also just announced their Personal Identity Provider implementation.

Let the Identity Big Bang begin!

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