OpenID & LID in a passel-world

[S. Sriram]

> Sometimes, a technology "wins" by most metrics.  Just because it hasn't

Live journal had 7 million identity urls. OpenID turned these into
authenticable profile data elements. Blog/Comments being the use case 
and this now creates an ever expanding cycle of adoption.

Large Email service providers have multi-million email accounts. 
Which identity system can turn them into authenticable profile 
data elements ?

Passel is clearly well positioned to do this, the only
challenge being providing a service that motivates the user to 
'download the plug-in'.

OpenID by design is inherently incapable of authenticating other
profile elemnts, it can be modified to 'pass' other data elements
such as foaf data but not authenticate them. Even if one builds
a special purpose consumer/server that provides an email
verification service, you still need a standard handshake
between consumers and servers and also with the end-user i.e.
does he want to share this data element or not.

Passel incorporates all of that for email AND other data elements.

So then the question becomes would passel live in an OpenID world 
or vice versa. It seeems to me that OpenID will have to live in
a passel world.

LID since it does not have a large seed base and therefore no
increasing cycle of adoption would contribute its ideas to the
new identity framework rather than adoption. So, if one were to
build a non-authenticated light weight profile passing mechanism
that tacks onto OpenID, one might consider having pointers to
FOAF, vcard data etc. within the identity_url head that specialized
consumers/servers process.

Thanks
S. Sriram