Forward Looking Design Decisions
I wrote about the Identity necklace and did get some comments about the post. From a user standpoint, it is clear that carrying different IDs around is an annoyance, but there seems to be wide variation in how willing people are in putting up the inconvenience. From an application standpoint, there is a significant difference between retrofitting an existing system to inter operate with other systems and designing systems from the ground up to co-exist with other applications and services. The former can be a much involved problem based on the complexity of the existing system. As for new applications in the early stages of their development, it is not too late to make interoperability as a "must have" design goal.
The obvious follow up to this discussion is about tools and technologies. What makes it even more challenging is to make design decisions in the early stages of an evolving ecosystem. It becomes important to follow and track the standards without compromising innovation and creativity. OpenID is a standard that can be the underlying principle of an open, extensible, and royalty-free identity system for the internet. Mike Graves has explained how getting and OpenID from the Verisign Personal Identity Provider can get you a glimpse of things to come.
Here is a story of a company that has shown tremendous agility and made a swift move away from the old way of doing things. I met Terrell and Fred at the IIW 2006 in Mountain View a few weeks back. They had skipped their finals to be at the conference. They have a neat idea to let people take control of their "Google Resume". They had an almost predictable starting point in how users would start using their service. Users are shown the familiar screen to sign-up, choose an username ... you know the routine! When you are done, add one more pearl to your Identity necklace! They have since revamped the service to support OpenID. Now I can use my OpenID to signup into their service. How refreshing!
Terrell and Fred built ClaimID with Ruby on Rails. They are not the only ones embracing Rails as a development platform. It is considered as one of the hottest technologies around and is gaining tremendous momentum. I have been following Rails for a while and will be speaking at RailsConf in Chicago this Friday.
