I wish I could have attended the panel discussions Dave Kearns hosted at the European Identity Conference. His emphasis on Context is very timely. In my current work with telecommuncations operators, the ability to leverage Context in what I call “Identity-enabled Service Orchestration” is a key factor in delivering highly personalized, high value online services.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management

Twistori.com is an intriguingly simple web page that shows a scrolling list of Twitter updates that include the key word you select from a list of six basic human emotions. This presents both an interesting view of people’s expressed emotions and an intriguing example of the many little applications emerging around the Twitter phenomena.

The burgeoning collection of Twitter updates from a rapidly growing population of Twitterers represents a huge repository of expressions of human intellect, emotion or inanity. Undoubtedly, psychologists are salivating as they imagine how to mine this veritable corucopia of public information. Twistori gives just one little peek into this possibility.

Twistori leverages a more general Twitter application, Summize.com, which allows you to specify the keywords you want to monitor. These are just a couple of the neat little web 2.0 apps I have seen lately. Tonight I configured RSSFwd.com to send my Twitter updates to EverNote on the web, which in turn synchronizes with Evernote on my deskstop. Getting all this functionality to interrelate in interesting ways is really intriguing.

Is it a stretch to regard this convoluted interrelationship of cyberspace applications an extension of my Identity? I wonder.

In twistori-speak: I love to dabble in social media … I hate my computer when it crashes … I think I spend too much time at this … I believe I will sign off now and watch the ball game … I feel tired after a long day … I wish you all good night!

Technorati Tags: Twitter,
Social Media,
Digital Identity

Scott Fehrman informed me today that the inaugural Sun Microsystems Identity Management user group meeting for the San Francisco Bay area was held last week at the Sun Santa Clara Campus. Those interested in joining the SFBay user group, please send an email to “REQUEST_SFBAY_IDM_LUG [AT] sun [DOT] com“

By the way, the photo of Sun’s campus came from an interesting article about Santa Clara County. The article included this tidbit about the Sun Campus: “Uniting Santa Clara’s past with the future, Sun Microsystems has rehabilitated the Agnews Insane Asylum, originally built in 1888 for the humane treatment of the mentally ill.”
(Photograph by Judith Silva, courtesy of the City of Santa Clara)

We trust that not all Sun employees who occupy the campus are insane.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems

Let me add my applause to the chorus cheering the OpenSSO Fedlet, unveiled and demonstrated by Daniel Raskin.

This represents a great step forward in the ease of deploying federation services, particularly for trading partners that don’t have any federation infrastructure in place. Making federation services easier and easier to deploy should definitely accelerate wide adoption of federation to link companies and individuals together in more and more meaningful ways.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems,
Federation

I just learned of an interesting session that will be conducted on May 5th in the CommunityOne section of the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

According to the session abstract:

This session explains how to use OpenSSO to construct a “virtual collaboration stack” that seamlessly integrates popular social networking and Web 2.0 applications such as Dopplr, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Apps with internal enterprise applications. Developers can securely create loosely coupled “virtual collaboration portfolios,” using standard federation protocols. Through the use of OpenSSO, they can create a mosaic of applications and services and provide end users with a single customer view that is personalized to each user.

The presentation demonstrates how to integrate your applications with common Web 2.0 and social networking applications. Among the topics are the following:

• Overview of federated single sign-on
• Overview and demonstration of standards-based federation (OpenID, CardSpace, OAuth, SAML, WS*)
• Identity services using an IDE of choice (NetBeans™ IDE, Eclipse, Visual Studio)
• Global login, logout, account linking and delinking
• Web services security

I’ve seen part of the demo. Really cool stuff.

The session will be hosted by Sun Microsystems federation gurus:
Pat Patterson, Daniel Raskin, and Nick Wooler.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
Sun Microsystems,
JavaOne

The April 12th edition of the Economist features an exellent series of articles on the impact of mobile telephony and computing on society. I recommend careful reading of the article by anyone associated with or impacted by the mobility culture. That is just about all of us.

I am writing this article from my hotel room in Frisco, TX, where I am staying to address Sun’s Identity Management Roadshow later in the day. I find myself a protypical nomad described in the article, “Nomads at Last.” Enabled by an laptop, PDA, email, mobile telephony, and social media, I am no longer tethered to a specific office, but can set up shop almost anywhere, any time.

The mobility phenomena is even changing our language, as evidenced by a recent text message I received from my 14 year old daughter to wrap up a SMS sequence: “Ok well i gtg so ttyl.” (I’ve got to go, so talk to you later, in SMS speak.)

The Homo Mobilis article suggests, “If researchers in ivory towers now debate the arrival of Homo mobilis, their tongue is only partially in their cheek. Once again the biggest shift seems to involve language, and by implication thought and feeling. That major linguistic change is afoot is clear to anybody who has been around young people almost anywhere in the world. Entire subcultures now define themselves primarily or exclusively through their chosen text-messaging or instant-messaging argot.”

All of this change, however, oddly enables closer family ties. With each member of our large family (yep, 6 kids) having mobile phones, email and blogs, we check up on each other frequently and stay in remarkably close communications. When I was travelling extensively in the 1980’s, I had to let my wife know the precise telephone numbers where she could call me during the day and night. Now, she’ll often ask, “Where are you today?” when I call from a distant city. My precise location has become much less important because mobile phones and email have effectively collapsed time and space.

Ironically, because of location-based services that add “the third element (‘where’) required to understand a person’s context, the other two being who and when”, Claudia might not even have to ask where I am. She will always know. One problem, though – if I hug my phone, I don’t get nearly the same response as I get from her!

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Mobility

Masoud Kalali recently posted an interesting article about the Open Provisioning ToolKit (OpenPTK), “an open source User Provisioning Toolkit exposing API’s, Web Services, HTML Taglibs, JSR-168 Portlets with user self-service and administration examples.”

Mausoud provides a good overview of the toolkit and then provides specific examples, including sample code, on how to extend OpenPTK. This is an excellent example of how open source collaboration can accelerate innovation.

Thanks to my colleague Scott Fehrman for sharing this article.

Technorati Tags: Identity,
Digital Identity,
Identity Management,
OpenPTK,
opensource