In a recent interview, Bob Blakley of the Burton Group, recently was asked about "the most serious problem" interoperable identity is facing. He responded:

The most serious question we’re facing - and really it trumps all the others - is “how do identity providers make money”?

Now here is a true statement about this budding industry if I ever heard one. As far as I can tell, today none of the public OpenID Providers has anything resembling a business model for what they do, not even the inklings of one. With the exception of the very big guys (e.g. AOL) where also asserting identities to third parties is a small incremental cost to their offering, while potentially reaping lots of indirect benefits, such as visibility into the browsing behavior of their customers.

[This explains why we stopped investing into our public identity provider some time ago. I simply can't see how a startup can make any money off it. It will stay around and keeps signing up customers, and it's an interesting project to learn from. But money?]

This does not mean there aren’t a number of identity-provider-related business opportunities around that actually do have a model. And yes, some of you reading this have asked us about this and we are glad to help out, either directly or with partner(s).

Phil Windley writes about Barbie dolls with embedded keys for Barbie-based social networking, and the obvious (for people with kids …) dynamics of technology adoption that will play out.

Sounds like good ol’ PGP key signing parties were simply going after the wrong audience for mass-market success …

(More seriously, there are several lessons in here somewhere …)

I hereby do notify the world that I shall not join any form of online service that has any of the following features:

• Requires me to work out who my friends are.
• Asks me to approve you as a friend before we can communicate.
• Sends me an email to tell me someone didn’t send me an email.
• Wants me to register before I can contribute.
• Wants me to write a constant narrative of my life just in case someone unspecified wants to read it.
• Expects me to manually give my availability or location for any reason.
• Endorses products to others based using my name.

Coming next:

• Any non-commercial site that doesn’t use OpenID and wants me to create yet another username and password. (And you can guess which qualifier I’ll be dropping after that.)

Yes, my Facebook account is closed. (And if you invite me to join a Facebook group, I won’t.)

link

We have come a long way if people can make statements like that. Take note, while Martin is an alpha-thinker, many will follow him before too long.

Just received the following invitation:

OMG MARTE Information Day

Modeling Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems

OMG Technical Meeting Special Event

Burlingame, CA USA - December 12, 2007

I started the Real-Time Analysis and Design working group of the Object Management Group back in 1998, almost 10 years ago, and ran it for a bit before I dropped out to focus on my bubble-era startup. Seems like these guys have been busy in the meantime!

For an initiative that was started by accident (yes!) this has been surprisingly durable.