Allen Tom of Yahoo! announced that results of their OpenID usability studies are available. It's great to see them do that — both doing the study, and releasing the results.

Google did something similar earlier.

Are the results depressing? Personally, I don't think so: instead, they are a call to action. Let's get our hands dirty and fix what needs fixing...

This is just too funny. It's mostly James McGovern's fault I think ... look at the images from duckdown.blogspot.com below.)

In-lined for your amusement:

One could think I have rather refined political opinions, but I usually don't blog about those...

Phil Hunt thinks I'm "right on the money" about the culture clash between the Liberty Alliance and the Identity Commons.

The amazing thing to me is that so far, nobody has clearly articulated why having a single Überorganization for all things identity is really critical. After all, we don't have one for databases, say, or networking protocols. Or toasters. Why do we need one for identity? If these customers aren't shouting, perhaps they don't see a reason to shout?

Personally, I'm increasingly coming to the realization that not only there isn't an "identity market" today, there likely won't be one in the future either. Doc Searls implementing Vendor Relationship Management (arguably one end of the identity spectrum) has virtually nothing to do with, say, a hard-pressed IT guy trying to retrofit his mainframe applications to do E-SSO (arguably the other end of the spectrum). So why would we insist that they are part of the same market?

Of course, I continue to be very convinced that substantial (i.e. multi-billion) markets will emerge, but I'm now saying markets, not market any more. Chances are none of them will be called "identity".

Methinks that if many members of the (as I argue, non-existing) "identity market" aren't actually in the same market — even if they use some of the same technologies — we should not be surprised that organizations addressing parts of this non-market should have difficulties to merge.

Again an example for where "small pieces loosely joined" seems to be a better (organizational) architecture than the alternatives. Not surprisingly many people have made that point since, such as on the IDTBD mailing list.