* Reader's view on consumer oriented Cirlces of Trust
Last week, I asked (rhetorically, I thought) where were the Liberty Alliance Circles of Trust we had been led to believe would be prevalent by now. I didn’t really expect to hear from Liberty (and I didn’t) but one reader did come up with a thoughtful, reasoned theory. He’s a consultant in the federated identity space, so I won’t name him (retaliation is so juvenile, but also so ubiquitous). He wrote:
Last week, I asked (rhetorically, I thought) where were the Liberty Alliance Circles of Trust we had been led to believe would be prevalent by now. I didn’t really expect to hear from Liberty (and I didn’t) but one reader did come up with a thoughtful, reasoned theory. He’s a consultant in the federated identity space, so I won’t name him, just in case a potential client doesn’t agree with his remarks.He wrote:
“I’ve been working on various federated identity projects as a consultant for the past three years. I believe the problem with Liberty in the consumer space is a basic cost/benefit issue. There’s little value to the consumer, and consequently, little on which to build a business case to justify the cost of creating federated circles of trust (CoT).
“Practically speaking, any consumer oriented Liberty CoT that might exist today is providing nothing more then single sign on. As much as SSO is desired, I doubt it is enough to convince most consumers to use a member of a CoT rather than an existing preferred vendor. In other words, a consumer isn’t going to start using a different hotel chain just because their preferred hotel chain and their preferred airline belong to different CoT.
“From a business perspective, I don’t think the current value proposition that Liberty offers is enough to support a business case for undertaking the effort to negotiate the trust agreements and build the functionality into existing systems. I think this will continue to be true until the ID-SIS spec [see John Fontana’s article at https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0412lib.html for more on ID-SIS] is available in off-the-shelf products, consumer oriented services are built on the ID-SIS spec, trust agreements are fairly well standardized, and the technical implementation is simple enough for small to medium sized businesses to manage. I also believe this is true whether the goal is to build upon existing affinity relationships or to build new relationships.
“As you mentioned, affinity marketing is nothing new. It’s now a matter of understanding how federated services change the Web enabled marketplace.”
I don’t find any flaws in that argument, and it does help to explain why the Liberty Alliance is both hot on the trail of its own Web services framework as well as vociferous in its calls for convergence with the Microsoft, IBM Web Services Framework specifications. But, as always, my inbox is open for your thoughts.
