Microsoft has joined forces with the Web 2.0 vanguard, as Bill Gates announced Tuesday in a keynote at the RSA security conference that Microsoft was going to support a distributed identity system known as OpenID.

This is interesting. OpenID has been discussed on MemeStreams before. While it would be useful for MemeStreams to serve OpenID so that our users could use their accounts to post on blogs that accept it, accepting it here is a different story. OpenID essentially allows anonymous blog commenters to maintain a persistent identity across the Internet. As we don't accept anonymous comments, adding this sort of capability presents more challenges for us than for blogs that do. We've talked about allowing anonymous comments, but this can open the door to more spam, particularly in threads that aren't fresh. It would be nice if a real identity sharing technology was layered on top of OpenID to ease account creation. There is a system that attempts to do this, but it suffers from the same scope limitations that FOAF does. Either way, I think we've got some simpler coding work that needs to be done on this site before that bubbles up to the top of our todo list.

Has anyone here messed with Cardspace?

Microsoft supports OpenID