We all hate passwords – they are insecure and burdensome; but they seem so firmly entrenched that they will be around for a long time. The New York Times recently wrote a story about Information Cards, an interesting attempt to overcome some of the deficiencies of passwords. The article draws a conflict between Information Cards and Open ID, that Paul Trevithick, the chairman of the Information Card Foundation, hurried to deny, characterizing the efforts as complementary. Trevithick concludes:
I really don’t think we’ll get Internet scale adoption with any of the “pure-play†but partial solutions on their own. Instead, take an “extract†of OpenID, mix in a derivative of Liberty (esp. ID-WSF) services at that endpoint, top it off with i-cards, browser integration, and run it on all platforms (including mobile), and maybe we’ll have a recipe for something that works in enough real world situations to be generally useful.