There is an interesting email published over at Joel's from Eddie Kessler, VP of Engineering at Napster. He says, "As Napster's vice president of engineering and CTO during much of this time, please let me share an alternative perspective. Building a paid music site based on peer-to-peer technology involved more work than you might think at first glance. " A 7 item list follows, 4 of which are, surprisingly, related to digital identity.

Does this make Napster an Identity company? I don't think so. As happy about DIDW and their new weblog as I am, I don't buy in their "identity is the centre" philosophy, which is IMHO way too much visionary.  Having a vision and communicating it is pretty important, but making the vision come true in the dirty ugly reality we are living is important too. 

Registration, user management (mentioned by the Napster's guy) and integration of user-related data acrosss various silos and sources, incredible amount of tedious work to find out all the legacy applications, interfaces and funny integration scripts, resolving political battles of "who owns the user" is what  the grand concept is about in reality. Not very glamorous, I'm afraid. I wouldn't even call it identity, if the term wasn't there.

Similarly, RFID is another technology that is supposed to be in. Does it come as a surprise that goods in most retail chains are already tagged? Given the number of shops equipped with the technology, the RFID industry cannot be that small. How comes it is suddenly "identity" and not "supply chain".

Now, I am waiting to be convinced that the objective of identity-the-next-big-thing-techno-talk is not to draw attention of venture capitalists by defining a new juicy industry segment?

  8:30:53 PM    

Seems I won't need to blog identity issues anymore. Syndicating content from a new DIDW blog with feeds from other well established sites gives you as good coverage of the topic as you could imagine.  7:39:38 PM    

"We see opportunities for interoperability between Passport and Liberty Alliance; this option could be part of a 1.1 specification, possibly later this year," said Paul Madsen. [Infoworld]  6:19:02 PM