Empowering People and the Coming Identity Layer of Everything - IT Conversations: Kaliya Hamlin: "As citizens of the Internet, we manage our identity as a set of different login names on web sites, email addresses, a handful of phone numbers and our various IM handles. Kaliya Hamlin, the Identity Woman, presents a vision of a manageable number of identities per user, if not just one, that works well for citizens, applications, communities as well as operators.

OpenID, iNames and LID are implementations of this vision in the form of an interoperable, open standards service discovery protocol that defines endpoints between services. It is being widely adopted. AOL has given OpenIDs to over 75 million of their users. Over 1200 websites are OpenID enabled and the numbers are growing by 15 to 20 websites a day. There's a 7% weekly growth in the number of such websites. Microsoft's CardSpace software that ships with Vista and was back ported to Windows XP, Novell and IBM's supported Higgins project are also efforts in the same direction.

For the operator, the opportunity space is in the special relationship between the operator and the customer. The operator manages the customer premises equipment in terms of modems at home, by giving out handsets or authenticating the SIM chip that gets on their network. Authenticating endpoints as OpenID providers to physical devices can play well."

(Read Original Article - Via IT Conversations: Kaliya Hamlin.)