I'm listening to the Liberty Alliance's webcast on their new "People Service". (There's a repeat on January 25.) The "people service" intends to complement existing Liberty work with a service that allows people to socially network with each other, and socially share information.I've got to admit that this is not something I would have expected from Liberty ... it runs counter to its traditional reputation ... but I very much like the direction this is going.

There are many open questions, however, and many are being asked right now in the Q&A; most relate to what all the other bits and pieces need to be in place, and how they need to look like, before this can be adopted and used successfully.

From my perspective, the biggest question is one of adoption. The examples they have been using in the webcast are Flickr and the like — is it really in the interest of somebody like Flickr to allow other photo sharing providers to have the same kind of feature set as Flickr, when interacting with Flickr users? I seriously doubt it ... because it removes a key reason for new users to sign up to Flickr.

Of course, this dynamic is not specific to Liberty; however, by delivering truly user-centric identity (which is not what Liberty does, it remains company-centric), there's an additional adoption vector that user-centric identity systems can ride that Liberty can't.

I wonder what kind of adoption they will be getting for this ... so far, they might not have any, but then, the spec is not final yet.