The Real McCrea

It’s Day One of the Internet Identity Workshop, a semi-annual gathering of the thought leaders in the online identity space. This grass-roots event, which has been around for three years, now finds itself at the center of a space that is really heating up, with big mainstream Internet players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, and Facebook, all racing to outdo each other as identity providers.

Among the talks:

David Recordon (of SixApart, the OpenID Foundation, and the Open Web Foundation) had a great talk on OpenID and the great progress being made, with mainstream adoption in the U.S. and Japan, in particular. Not surprisingly, there will be lots of sessions on OpenID over the next three days, talking about a variety proposed extensions. Given all the recent announcements (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and MySpace), this is really OpenID’s time to shine. I took a few photos to capture the moment.

Photos from David Recordon’s talk:

Interesting talks on SAML and Information Cards, two topics I don’t know very much about. SAML is more on the enterprise side of identity. Information Cards seeks to span both the enterprise and consumer Internet space. Information Cards has a focus on verifiable claims, like “Joe Smith is over 21”.

Oh, and I snapped a fun shot of MySpace’s MAx Engel, who was at the back of the room, getting his laptop juiced, and working with totally casual posture. Max is doing great stuff to bring the Open Stack to life at MySpace.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo just gave another great talk, this one on the “Open Stack” and how it is greater than the sum of its parts. The PowerPoint can be downloaded
here. Joseph demoed the combo of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and XRDS-Simple. And he shared screenshots of a Portable Contacts app for Android. Way cool!

Here are some photos of his talk.