...instead of giving up and not allowing comments. He also points out the futility of trying to legislate something like this, and suggests the problem needs a technical solution.

Somewhat surprisingly, a whole series of speakers have been talking about the importance of identity today at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference. From the telcos (France Telecom in the morning), to several softphone providers, myself and now Microsoft. I've also had numerous side conversations with people who recognize the problem, don't want to contribute to more identity stovepipes and are a very receptive audience for URL-based identity. URLs, and the open, multi-party YADIS effort just make a lot of intuitive sense ...

Unfortunately I didn't get the name of the speaker from Microsoft because he was a last-minute replacement and seems to have disappeared. Although he didn't title the talk that way, it was really identity that he was talking about, almost exclusively.

Surprisingly, he didn't mention InfoCard a single time. But then, he was talking about presence and e-mail and real-time communications, and things like that, which I don't think InfoCard attempts to address. (Does it, can somebody correct me if I'm wrong?) URLs would make a lot of sense for the use cases he was talking about ... I wonder how Microsoft is going to integrate those approaches ...

Update: I managed to intercept the gentleman from Microsoft for a few minutes during the coffee break. I still don't know his name because he didn't give me a card and he was in a hurry (he might have been a senior director in the real-time communications group, or something like it?). I asked about InfoCard and was told "we are aware of it, but don't know it in a lot of detail. We have not done any integration so far." (I felt he didn't have a good idea about what that might mean either, e.g. what the user experience for his use cases would look like with InfoCard in the loop.) I guess that's to be expected given what a huge company Microsoft has become, and how hard it must be just to create awareness for new technologies at all affected groups...

I also asked about some of the use cases he mentioned in his talk, and he said "there are these light-weight identity things now, like LID..." I admit I didn't expect him to bring that up! It appears that awareness of what LID (and YADIS and friends) bring to the party is growing, even at Microsoft!

Kaliya, you were there, too: do you recall this conversation the same way? Anything to add?