Today has been fun. We had Indian for lunch. Something about set my mouth on fire. Nearly killed me. During the geek demo hour I met Kevin Mark from Technorati who is one of the key players in the Microformats world. I also went to a session sponsored by Chris Messina (factoryjoe) who focused on Microformats and how they relate to Identity.
I had a chance to talk to developers from Sxip and Janrain who helped me understand how OpenID works and pointed me at code.
David Huska, developer from Sxip, told me about XDI (XDI home) which let me to the current talk that I am attending which is about XRI and XDI. (OASIS subgroup) Andy from OOTAO is showing an example of Kintera, a non profit services provider, sharing data with Le leche a non profit. XDI is the interface that Le Leche uses to access the Kintera systems. It lets a machine make requests to a remote system kind of like SQL lets an app query a database. Kind of interesting, and useful for large enterprise systems. The example being shown requires that the two parties know each other and setup a complex contract before interactions are allowed to occur. Useful for those that need it, but so far it seems rather heavy for main stream consumption.
I spent a while talking to Devlin from BYU about the new REST stuff in Rails 1.2. He is a Rails genius and I need to spend more time with him.
I came late to the Cardspace session, but it looks pretty cool and Kim Cameron is an amazing guy. This could be on of the better, more innovative, and useful things to come out of Microsoft in a while. Cardspace could be a really cool way to help normal users play in the advanced Identity space. I think we might borrow his PHP code tonight and see how far we can get on a Ruby library. Bill Barnes, a guy that works with Kim is supposed to be interested in a Ruby library as well.