11 January, 2006 - 1:47pm

The leading experts in user-centric identity were recently conveyed for an in-depth podcast to discus what's been accomplished and their predictions for the coming year. We agree with moderator, Doc Searls', conclusion that significant progress has been made in the identity space with URL/URI based systems. As the blogosphere shows, these locations and pages are a way of representing identity that people are familiar with and are a means to how we get "there" (to widespread deployment) from "here" (developing identity sytems).

Sxip's founder and CEO, Dick Hardt, discussed our plans for the year, including the rollout of sxore, which solves the problem of comment and trackback spam on blogs and enables the start of an identity ecosytem. He noted that we're taking a big picture approach to internet identity that doesn't just provide single sign-on and form-fill, but that mimics identity and trust in the real world. Dick described SXIP 2.0, the next generation of our simple extensible identity protocol, which is lightweight, handles the real issues of today, but also has a framework that allows users to do harder identity tasks in the future.

Other identity luminaries participating in the hour and half discussion were Kim Cameron, Johannes Ernst, Mary Hodder, Paul Trevethick, Aldo Castaneda, John Clippinger, and Drummond Reed. Everyone agreed that in addition to having all systems interoperate, that privacy and anonymity are key to user trust and adoption. More information on the hour and half interview is available at the Gillmor Gang.