Over on Scripting News, Dave says:
An idea is in the air in blogging land, a global identity system so you don’t have to re-enter your name, email address and weblog url in every comment system you visit.
Wow. Now why didn’t I think of that? Sure, Microsoft’s implementation is prohibitively expensive for Joe and Jane Blogger, but wouldn’t it be cool if Microsoft chose to make a less-expensive version for noncommercial sites? This would have some immediate benefits for Microsoft. First of all, it would help lessen the sting of their almost-total victory in the antitrust case. Second, and more importantly, it would help increase adoption and penetration of Passport, which is critical to their .NET Services strategy. The way to get people to sign up for an authentication system is to give them content they want; the porn-meisters figured this out a long time ago. It would also help push adoption of the Passport API in advance of the Liberty Alliance folks actually shipping products.
What’s the downside for Microsoft? Well, some people would just complain that it was all some kind of monopolistic trick. It’s possible that some of the pricing advantage of a flat yearly all-you-can-eat fee would be diluted by a cheap, low-transaction-count version. However, on balance I think opening the Passport sevice, as opposed to just the APIs, has the potential to be a win-win.
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