BACKGROUND:  Mary and I attended an OpenID2 meetings on Thursday night - at her offices on University Ave. in Berkeley. In attendance were Kaliya Hamlin (Indentity Woman), Dick Hardt (Sxip), Owen Davis (Identity Commons), Scott Kveton (JanRain), Fen Labalme, Andy Tao and a host of other ‘open ID’ folks.

David Recordon (Verisign) gave us a status report on LOTS of ambitious projects going towards making OpenID2 a fully featured ID system.  Many of the missing ingredients from OpenID 1.1 are being contributed to the new codebase by Sxip and JanRain.  Libraries for Perl, php, python, Ruby and Java are all being produced. 

In fact what we’re seeing is the repositioning of Sxip - away from its own protocol - into a leading contributer to OpenID2 and best of breed vendor.  JanRain is also in that category - so we now have TWO professional organizations making sure our OpenID2 standards get fulfilled.

But its gonna take a while for that all to happen.  Meanwhile Mary and I (and lots of other vendors) are wishing to deliver to our CUSTOMERS compelling new experiences which will be (eventually) fulfilled using OpenID2.  So how do we ‘have our cake and eat it too?’

How do we deliver those compelling experiences NOW - without waiting for the world to jump onto the OpenID2 bandwagon?  Its a classic open standards catch-22 challenge.

So Mary gets up and says “You know guys, I really don’t care about WHICH authentication standard or Identity provider to support, we just want ONE that you all can tell us is the one to support.  Make our lives easier.”  Mary was representing the 10 other aggregator and video linking players that she’s been working with.  But she was also pointing out the delimna that all software vendors have - when faced with making a choice between ‘competing formats’.

Well hopefully what Mary will learn is that OpenID2 is the format -a nd that having multiple ID providers is a good thing.  But that’s all really irrelevant NOW - as there’s so much education and learning curve that the world has to grok - til we get to the pure world empowered by OpenID2 compliant systems.

What we ultimately want to do - is connect together our systems so that our end-users can utilize and benefit from similar functionality implemented differently on different systems.  So a Mefeedia user can take their video links playlist and move it into dabble. Very simple - right?

Well - welcome to my world.  So that’s the background to this open letter…….

So now begins the open letter:

Hey Mary,

First of all - congrats on shipping dabble.  I’ve been using it and it’s GREAT!  I’d REALLY love to see you and your vendor partners (folks who are also doing video tagging, aggregating, link lists, etc.) to establish a common set of calls and schemas (notice I didn’t use the S word) - so we (BBM and PeopleAggregator) can support them - too.

These calls and schemas would facilitate the movement of tags and playlists and user ID info etc. (including friends and groups) and we want it to happen NOW.  Admittedly so - the OpenID2 usage screanrio and eco-system will need some time to grow, but I’m hoping that you’ll hang in there and support it - as we are.

But I also want to propose that we come up with some short termed ‘hard wired’ scenarios that can be implemented fairly quickly - so that we can achieve our own goals of delivering data inter-change between disparate systems.

We want our cake and eat it too.  We want to be able to contribute and help the world of OpenID2 happen over the next year or two - but we also need to ship code today which can connect together different sites together.  We’re all startups, so we don’t have a ton of money or resources to do that.

So I propose:

- supporting OpenID2 - and give .01%-2.0% of our userbase something coolio to support

- that we also use a traditional username/password approach (for the other 98%) and connect our various membership systems together and give our end-users the ability to move their data back and forth between these systems.

So that means sitting down and working out the specifics of connecting membership systems together.  Not rocket science - this has been going on - for years.  But its a point-to-point deal, with each system having to have its own unique ‘interfaces’ to the systems it wants to talk to.

Then each system has to make it clear what it expects to send and what form that data will be in.

Then you and your cohorts should work on the details of connecting your data together using this approach and we’re all set to go!  We (BBM) will gladly support whatever you come up with - so we can suck and spit those video link playlists into and out of PeopleAggregator - and everybpdy is happy!

So that’s what I wanted ot say - lets support OpenID2 - but let’s also come up with some hard wried approaches - in the short term - or else it’ll take forever for us to deliver what we want to our customers.

Thanks.

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