I really hope that the postmortems for Cardspace are more sophisticated that the recent analyses of OpenID. Already some tweeps are positioning this as 'another battle lost' in the Google vs Microsoft war. And others are bemoaning that Facebook Connect will now "win" top prize in identity.
The lesson of the Identity Metasystem (more than Cardspace per se) and of OpenID is that there is no single prize to be won in identity!
Siloed identity systems resist federation and are far harder to deconstruct than first appears. The spread of identities we each have today have evolved to fit specific niches in the business ecosystem. Taking a cell phone identity for instance and trying to federate it into a banking relationship is like taking a salt water fish and dropping it into a fresh water tank.
The deep vital lesson to be learned from OpenID and Cardspace is that we already have a perfectly good identity ecosystem. And it has already created a diversity of robust evolved identities, which cannot be simply reengineered Frankenstein-like with fancy engineering tools like SAML and JSON to deliver utopian outcomes like web single sign on.
So fear not, Frankenbook Connect has no chance of taking over the [real] world.
Discussion on:
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