CardSpace is not Information Card
In an otherwise excellent article entitled When will Windows Live stop treating CardSpace as the unwanted stepchild? Simon Bisson and Mary Branscome confuse a technology with an implementation. They refer to CardSpace when they mean Information Card. This undermines the ecosystem and is ultimately not good for Microsoft.
The use of the word “CardSpace” in the article’s title was incorrect. The authors also wrote things like (emphasis added):
So why is Windows Live ID proudly announcing that it’s issuing OpenIDs but not CardSpace IDs?
I don’t even know what a CardSpace ID is. Information Card is the name of an open standard that has multiple competing implementations. One of these implementations is a Selector called Microsoft CardSpace™. Other implementations of Selectors and other components include Novell Bandit’s DigitalMe™, Higgins, OpenInfoCard, CardPress™, Azigo™, and so on. Information Card tech already has the non-profit Information Card Foundation backed by over 50 corporate members including Intel, Deutsche Telekom, Equifax, Novell, Google, and Oracle as well as a growing community of independents, FOSS developers, etc.
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Hi again Paul! Mea culpa, but…
On the one hand, guilty as charged – I know that CardSpace is a specific implementation of information cards. If I make it to Mountain View next week you can beat me up in person.
On the other hand, I deliberately used the CardSpace term to underline that fact that Microsoft is failing to throw its full product and service weight behind a standard it was intimately involved in developing. I believe it’s a hugely positive thing that there are so many card selectors and a foundation and I certainly don’t want to undermine the ecosystem or fail to give Kim Cameron and his team credit for the huge improvement in Microsoft’s openness in this area. But I continue to find it disappointing that there are so few large-scale big-name managed card providers – and I’m hoping the psychology of using the Microsoft feature name underlines the oddity of the Live ID team not issuing information cards to be consumed in CardSpace alongside the Open ID identities it now issues. To get the information card logo on as many sites as the OpenID login logo, I think we need a large-scale managed card id provider issuing cards and raising the visibility of the technology so it comes more easily to mind when businesses and site owners are thinking about identity.
[Reply]
Comment by Mary Branscombe — November 5, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
Hi Mary, I agree wholeheartedly that we need large-scale, big-name managed i-card providers as you say. The good news is that I expect the first one will be announced within the month. And, of course you’re right that Microsoft Live ID should issue Information Cards. But there’s a paradox. Sometimes the more Microsoft does, the more this tech is perceived (incorrectly) as a proprietary, single vendor technology. To counteract, I try to change the word “CardSpace” to “Information Card” wherever I can.
[Reply]
Comment by paul — November 6, 2008 @ 6:16 pm