I tell people I’m a software generalist, but there are lots of holes in my knowledge. One of them is identity and I really must fix that, because it’s a hot pain point both for businesses and individual people. (How many passwords do you have?) Anyhow, our own Eve Maler is one of the people you want to watch in this space, and she’s pointing us at a bunch of action over in SAML-land, here, here, and here. For my money, the hot story is the Danish requirement that if you want to do federation, you should bloody well use SAML. The Danes have had positive experiences with shared standardized XML vocabularies, having scored a big win with UBL. I can’t imagine anything in the short term that would be of greater benefit for everyone than ubiquitous shareable identity services.
