IIW 2008A - Day Two
My notes on today's IIW sessions:
The first session I attended was co-presented by Dick Hardt and Max (last name?) from Yahoo!. Their concept was that a standard protocol could be developed for posting back your online contributions (i.e. blog comments, wiki edits, etc.) to an aggregator, even in situations where a relying party doesn't want to maintain a feed for your actions. Further, it was theorized that that aggregated feed could be used for reputation calculations... which puts in squarely in the territory already explored by our Pythia reputation system. The OpenID/OAuth folks there seem to have missed the "your story about me" principle of reputation, but it's still an interesting idea.
The second session presented by Mike Carr from Amazon, and was a great discussion about the role of large companies (like Amazon, AOL, and HP) in an OpenID ecosystem - should they be relying parties? or OpenID providers? or OAuth enabled? The focus of at least the identity people at these companies really does seem to be on what customers would actually want... I'm impressed, especially by my future employer, that the corporations aren't pursuing lock-in as their competitive strategy.
Joseph Smarr then gave a presentation on the "social web," especially on the interactions between identity providers, content aggregators, and social networks. Joe makes a good case for the social web, but I have to admin I'm still skeptical... I have yet to see any compelling use case for Facebook, etc. that's not just "online, up-to-date address book." The best point I took away from his talk: OpenID is useful because it enables the sharing of data across the web... "unlinkability" is really antithetical OpenID.
Dev and I completed our first-day IIW participation with a fantastic discussion with Eve Mahler, who (along with Paul Madsen) makes me very nearly want to use SAML for something. I'm glad to report that Eve, Paul, and various yahooligans seemed impressed with our ECLab research, which is encouraging given the looming thesis deadline.
To wrap up the conference for the day we sat through the mandatory kum-bay-yah circle of everybody agreeing. At least that's done now... two days down, one to go.
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