B. Mann Consulting

Scott Kveton does a bit of a round up of what some folks are working on a technical level with portable social networking, in and around OpenID and some loose markup.

He takes what, in my opinion, is a bit of a cut against Attribute Exchange:

Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so.

Sorry, Scott, when you use phrases like "hacked up", I take issue. Frankly, I would never have gotten on board with OpenID if I didn't see AX on the horizon as the logical conclusion of the SREG stop gap.

AX is an extensible system that will be able to pass many different kinds of information back and forth between systems. It has the same decoupled nature that OpenID has. Different sites can loosely couple by doing nothing more than using the same keys to define different sets of attributes. Why, exactly, would one NOT use this? In theory, one could do something as simple as host an agreed upon list of attributes -- based on FOAF, XFN, or for that matter any one of them in their own namespaces or with mapping between them.

I mean, we implemented syncing of user profiles using Drupal's simple distributed authentication + FOAF *3 years ago*. Working with SXIP in their various protocol incarnations, DIX, and finally the merging into OpenID and AX has all been part of the process of consensus around standards.

Attribute Exchange is a flexible, extensible base on which to implement many use cases around data exchange for user profiles and related information. Any solution around portable social networking should use this at its base, and the OpenID community should move to finalize the extension and move forward to building cool sh*t on top of it.

It's settled, I'm heading to Portland. I'm going to be there from Sunday, October 22nd to Wednesday, Oct. 25th.

On the schedule, in no particular order:

• See Dries Buytaert, who is in town for some sort of crazy Java optimization conference
• Catch up with Scott Kveton and the JanRain guys to plan world domination via OpenID v53
• Go to a Geek Dinner - organized by Alex Williams and co. over at Feedia (ditto on the world domination) 
• Go to a Drupal meetup on Tuesday night

I'm staying at the very funky White Eagle Hotel. I stayed at the Kennedy School a couple of weeks back when I was briefly in town for a vacation. These are a cool chain of hotels/breweries/etc. Highly recommended.

Scott Kveton announced the OpenID Code Bounty at OSCON today:

Integrate OpenID into your open source project and we’ll give $5,000 to your project.

We’ve seen OpenID really start to gain some momentum over the past couple of months and this Bounty program is really the exclamation point on that. There is a great list of sponsors for the program that includes people, organizations and businesses focused on building a simple, light-weight and decentralized user-centric identity platform around OpenID. Working with all of these people over the last couple of weeks has proven to me that convergence is really happening around OpenID.

I wasn't really a fan of the "original" OpenID spec. That is, it worked great, but only solved single sign-on. Then the Simple Registration Protocol, or SRP, got kludged in. This supports only 9 -- and exactly 9 -- attributes, and is not extensible. So, colour me firmly in the SXIP camp at this point.