Identity Management

Identity management is a lively topic for me right now, I’m no expert in the topic but have followed OpenID for a while and have had several internal conversations on the OpenID vs/or Liberty Alliance discussions going on. I’m not going to comment directly on that but I did get a newsletter from Opinity today and told me I could now use OpenID so i went and checked, seamless to do but not any sites that I currently use were on the list however Livejournal was so decided to try that one as been meaning to look at it for a while.

Once i got to the page there indeed was a link to login with OpenID which I choose, entered my new URL, taken to Opinity to login, authorise access and back to Livejournal – painless really and at least I don’t have yet another identity/set of login credentials.

Sadly there seems to be a major flaw in this which I hope gets rectified for the sake of OpenID adoption, when I tried to set up my journal I got an error page that informed me:

“Sorry – Non-LiveJournal.com users can’t post, as they don’t actually have journals here. You can leave comments in other journals, though.”

Shame really as being able to use one identity across all sites would be so useful for me, and I don’t really care a great deal who does it as long as it works across everything I want to use, which in my case means I want to use my SIM card to authenticate myself to any site on the web when browsing through my mobile rather than enter URLs and passwords, it’s just easier that way. If that was tied to an identity that also had a URL for PC based browsing then I’d be happier again, and if every website on the planet accepted those credentials I’d be in a utopian nirvana.

I remembered a post about this as I was writing and dug it out of NNW, it closes with the statement

Conclusion
Mobile requires even more than the Web a standard Digital ID approach due to both technical constraint of the mobile and the increase of data services available. The mobile already have the technical basis to do this (SimCard for instance) but no real solution has been yet put in place. So we can only wait more to see if existing Digital Signature solutions from the Web will move to mobile….

This seems to be the basis of the many discussions, along with how strong authentication and security is on both solutions, I’m happy to use my SIM because it will give me the best and simplest solution, not because I work for an operator btw

edit: forgot to update the title of the post, fixed now

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