Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

I know you! In fact, I know all about you; I know your friends, your school, your employer, and your style. I read your emails too.

I know your likes and dislikes, your political opinions. I know you better than you know yourself.

Seems farfetched, doesn’t it? It is nonetheless the reality of your world today. Someone out there has all that information about you, and until you get to know them and acknowledge the situation, there is nothing you can do about it.

Your digital credentials are your identity online, and you provide them every time you post a comment in your favorite movies forum or news room. Everytime you give a Stumble Upon thumbs up or Digg an article, every time you respond to that innocuous Twitter question or update your Facebook status, you are enriching the biggest personal identification database to ever exist.

This year is all about “Federated Identity”, or “Identity Management”. Facebook Connect went live in mid-spring 2008; it is an identification platform shared by roughly 200 of the most visited websites on the internet, and it provides standard ways to store personal data and share it with every member website. Your comments in CNN forums are now linked to your real identity in Facebook, as well as your online shopping habits. Facebook alone represents 150 million+ users and counting.

Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, VeriSign, AOL, and Symantec are responding to the new challenge by backing up OpenID. These companies roughly bring every internet user out there to the new open source federated identity framework. And it is currently used by popular sites like Plaxxo, twitter, CNN political market, MapQuest and much more.

In a nutshell, whatever you do online, and no matter where you do it, gives these conglomerates an inch worth of additional insight about you. The key word in assessing the difference between Facebook Connect and OpenID is “Open Source”, and you might want to find out more about that.

However, federated identity isn’t only about optimizing online advertising processes. It can be a powerful tool to your business too. It allows a more secure, effective and homogeneous way to interact with business partners, clients, and prospects. Everyday more companies implement a federated identity model to easily manage their hundreds of business applications and employees, and it makes a lot of sense. More on that later!

What do you think about this topic? You have a question, a complementary or diverging opinion? Please leave a comment. 

I wanted more. I want a practical approach that explains the basic technology, then how it fits into the business picture, before delving into more details. The bottom line is almost never how cool  would it be having an ESB in your architecture, nor is it how much maintenance costs would we cut by going virtual. It’s a mix of the two worlds. You need interesting and technologically relevant projects to attract the best and the brightest and keep them, and at the same time these projects must make sense economically to sustain activity and growth.

The first step  i took in setting up this blog was to publish a poll to gather feedback about the general interest about topics such as virtualization, high availability, SOA/Soap, single sign on, data-mining or identity management. Shortly after that I received an email introducing MonetDB, a newcomer in the open source database systems for high performance applications in data-mining, and so i would very much appreciate all feedback/leads to help me in this new endeavour.

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