The 10th Internet Identity Workshop this week had record attendance. Since that first one, five years ago, amazing adoption has happened: pretty much all major technology companies have implemented, more than a billion identities in the market, tens of thousands of sites accept them, more people show up to IIW — it must be the best of times.

But it is also the worst. To quote Phil Windley’s summary (go there, read the whole thing, it’s worthwhile):

InfoCards are largely dormant at this point. Kim Cameron, the father of InfoCards, has abdicated to France…

The only other player, Azigo, isn’t releasing updated selectors either… All of this adds up to a situation where no one would be comfortable adopting InfoCards…

OpenID continues to thrash towards becoming a viable solution. The politics surrounding OpenID are worthy of a soap opera…

If Phil had the harsh words for Cardspace and information cards this week, I guess I had the harsh words for the OpenID camp last week, calling what’s being developed there the Open Pile: turns out not one person (neither on the blog, nor in person) that I talked to this past week disagreed with my diagnosis; most agreed enthusiastically. But then everybody tends to turn around and has great fun adding more overlapping versions of protocols to the pile. Somebody go figure, because I don’t get it. How do we accomplish our vision of portable internet identity if we add more incompatibilities and never remove any?

So where does this leave us? Twelve steps forward and eleven back, taking two detours in the middle. Or something like that. The movement goes on. Thrashing, like a soap opera, as Phil says. There’s a pony in there somewhere waiting to come out, as John Panzer commented. Well, that pony better be patient.

You are not on the bandwagon yet? You are so behind the times! Haven’t you heard that the web is now social, and user-centric, your customers are in charge, they create and remix and share and rate and activity stream and manage you, the vendor, and you still haven’t implemented the Open Pile!

Ehm, I mean the Open Stack, sorry about that, a slip of the tongue here. The community has been working together hand in hand to define these exciting new standards, singing kumbaya all the time, how can you not have implemented them and look your manager into the eye?

So let’s get started right away. You need to implement OpenID for login, with NASCAR buttons so it’s easy for your users, not too many, not too few, and yes, a text field for those other identity providers, with of course a non-Javascript fallback, and information card detection in case somebody runs Vista or is an AAA member, and OAuth, well, there are several incompatible versions just like with OpenID and of course you have to support 2, 3, and I don’t quite remember how many more legs, which should of course do the hybrid with OpenID, rooted in cutting-edge discovery in all the needed ways: just three ways from Yadis, two from OpenID, some new well-known locations with LRDD and sometimes you have to check with Google directly, of course you have to be prepared to accept URLs, e-mail addresses, PPIDs and unreadable URLs as identifiers, claimed and proven, I’m sure your website folks figure out how to map them to their databases in no more than a few weeks, then you automagically (imagine!) get your user’s first and last name and e-mail address via SREG or AX (but there might be incompatible schemas) or Portable Contacts or Microformats, yeah, no provider supports all of those and many don’t support any but that’s just an implementation detail, and boy all the great info you will get via xAuth any time soon now and then you can publish activity streams and you even will make the Salmon run upstream! It’ll be SO GREAT!!

If I knew how to draw cartoons, I’d have a field day here.

No wonder Facebook is winning with a proprietary stack.

As we go into IIW next week, guys, it’s time to get real. It’s either we cut 80%+ off this pile, and make the remainder actually work, or give up. I just hope there won’t be proposals for more protocols next week. What about we all propose which 90% of our favorite pet projects we are willing to kill? The alternative, I’m afraid, is the way UNIX has been going in the face of first NT, and then Linux. “Open” means nothing if it’s just a pile.

P.S. Thanks to Kaliya for encouraging me to get this off my chest and annoy some people if it has to be that way.