Web 2.0 services continue to enrich online user experience by facilitating collaboration, participation, and communication. As a consequence, more and more details of our lives have been captured as data on the Web, making it imperative for users to have control over their data and to be able to move it from site to site. But providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a challenge, different from that of providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization or website.

Many individuals and organizations are working on various solutions for this problem. Dubbed Identity 2.0, the quest is for a user-centric identity management solution in a Web 2.0 context that would allow users to be able to move their identity data from any site to any other site as they do in the offline world with photo IDs. One of the solutions that has recently gained traction is SXIP - Simple, eXtensible Identity Protocol - a mechanism developed by Sxip Identity that gives users control over their online identities and provides websites with the ability to construct rich user-centric relationships.

In this short - but full - talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference, Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, combines style and substance to capture the complexity of participating in an online world and to show how identity is at the center of the Web experience. Dick then walks through his latest view of what a desirable, successful form of identity management would look like, and describes SXIP's position in regards to open source technology and the emerging Digital Identity market.