I am attending the Web 2.0 conference this week. There is an interesting combination of people here and I must admit that I feel like a foreigner as I am part of an academic group. The current session I am in is titled “The Next Internet Infrastructure.” I expected something about servers and bandwidth which would have been interesting, but I am getting something much better. Marc Canter, CEO, Broadband Mechanics (peopleaggregator.com), Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist, Amazon, Chad Dickerson, Yahoo!, and Jonathan Hare, Co-founder and CEO, Resilient are talking about identity and open APIs. It is good to know that big companies are interested in the cross domain authentication and authorization problem.
Here are some of the things said that I found interesting. I provide names because the context is important.
Chad Dickerson – future isn’t in mashups but in building compelling user applications
Jeff Barr – Future is in the legacy – take your old app, your old main frame, your faxes, and bring it into the
Marc Canter – We as developers want to use the infrastructure provided by Yahoo or Amazon but we don’t want to get locked into their data silos. Many vendors build products like computers, tvs, cell phones, stereos etc. Value is in building interoperability between those devices.