I think Johannes Ernst summarized pretty well what happened in a broad sense in regards to OpenId, Cardspace and Facebook Connect.

However, I'm more interested in the lessons we can take away from this.

First  - "Apple Lesson" - If user-centric identity is going to happen it's going to require not only technology but also a strong marketing campaign. I'm calling this the "Apple Lesson" because it's very similar to how Apple iPad saw success vs the tablet market. The iPad is not only a very good technology product but it was backed by a very good marketing plan. I know most people do not want to think about marketing here - but the fact is that nobody could really articulate why user-centric identity mattered in a way that the average person cared about.

Second - "Facebook Lesson" - Facebook Connect solves a number of interesting problems that is easy for both consumer and service providers. For a consumer it's simple to log-in without any redirects. And while Facebook isn't perfect on privacy - no other major consumer-focused service on the Internet provides as much control about sharing identity information. From a developer perspective it is very easy to implement the SSO and fetch other identity information (if the user has given permission). This could only happen because a major company just decided to make a singular focus to make it happen.

Third - "Developers Lesson" -  Facebook Social Graph API is by far the simplest API for accessing identity information which also is another reason why you're seeing such rapid growth in Facebook enabled Websites. By using a combination of URL and Javascript - the power a single HTML page now gives a developer writing Web applications is simply amazing. For example It doesn't get much simpler than this "http://api.facebook.com/mewilcox" for accessing identity. And while I can't yet share too much publicly about the specifics - the social graph API had a profound impact on me in designing our next generation APIs. 

Posted via email from Virtual Identity Dialogue