Got to quote this in its entirety:

Marc Cantor sets out his "ID Hub" story in further detail today. But he completely misses the point of the third wave of identity products. Cantor says he wants to "enable folks to easily move their personal data in and OUT of the system."

In other words, he wants to make it easier for you to copy all of your data from one silo to another!

But the promise of the third wave of identity is that silos are no longer necessary - silos can be removed - because identity data is available to be used whenever and wherever it's needed - the data should be pervasive and ubiquitous as well as federated and distributed.

The silos don't need my data when I'm not there, so there's no need for them to keep copies of it. It's actually better that they don't keep a copy since getting the data at the moment it's needed guarantees it's accuracy.

The bottom line is very simple: silos are bad. Making it easier to populate silos is aiding and abetting bad behavior. In criminal law, those who aid and abet a wrongdoer are also guilty. It should be the same in the identity market.

Ah, Dave, you just expressed something very concisely that I hadn't been able to articulate before but that had been bothering me. Thank you!

It's the equivalent between having RTF, so I can import a Word file into WordPerfect. That's good -- but a far cry from being able to use the Web, where all data is "just there" and no moving is required by the user. By analogy, imagine the Web built on an RTF process ... it would be much better than microfilm, but a pale shadow of what the web is.