Erik Benson:

"talkr will be a distributed identity system that ties Movable Type to Flickr’s authentication service via an MT plugin, and allows people to comment on talkr-enabled blogs through their Flickr account [...] This will allow you to maintain your identity in one place, while also enabling a couple much dreamed-about features such as:

• Get notified of new comments on posts that you’ve commented on
• Watch what your friends are talking about on other sites
• PGP sign your comments without tons of hassle

[...] It’ll also be able to aggregate things and find “most popular posts your friends are commenting on” and provide rss feeds galore."

Apart from Flickr, is any other social networking site offering an API? This promises to lead to all sorts of lego applications such as Reviewr, whose FAQ tells it all:

"The key thing, you see, is that social software isn’t a product in itself. It should be able to supplement the relationships you have with people you see every day, as well as make it easier to make friends with people you don’t see too often (or maybe never at all). To do this, social software needs to be an enabling technology."

We’re going to see powerful applications mixing and combining calls to services such as identity and presence, (meta) blogging, search, mapping, shopping, and payment (yes, Paypal will get to it, and its parent Ebay should smell the coffee and stop their elitist policy – they charge developers – or they’re going to be shut off from emerging, grassroots apps). Speaking of which, Google should include News and Froogle in their API already. And is Yahoo under the illusion that everything is going to happen on their own web site? Where is their developer program?
Update: I’m still cleaning my archives following my migration to MT, and I found this related entry I wrote more than two years ago: Why open authentication matters.

03/11/04 update: SharedID.com:

"SharedID is an authentication service that allows web users to share their personal information in a controlled manner with their favorite websites. SharedID is built on the open standards RSS, RDF and FOAF."

06/09/04 update: PeoplesDNS:

"The PeoplesDNS project is being created to allow traditional DNS style lookups in ‘peoplespace’ utilizing FOAF. It is a powerful way to search and lookup information on people and a powerful way for you to be integrated into products like PeopleAggregator and Tribe, Orkut etc. The pDNS system will be opensource, non-centralized and will be a series of independent servers operated by individuals and companies. PeoplesDNS.com will act as ‘Node1′ and distribute ‘zone files’ much the same way as the DNS system currently works.."

12/06/04 update: Sxip Networks.
12/08/04 update: Jon Udell: The semantic web, digital identity, and Internet governance mentions IdentityCommons. See also 2idi, comments from Fen Labalme, 2idi Proposes to Stop Spam by Peer-to-Peering the World, What’s your i-name?. 2idi is connected to Cordance, a company previously known as OneName (see XNS). Plus this manual trackback exchange between Fen and me.