Re: [mmox] The Story So Far...

["Hurliman, John" <[e-mail]>]

The proposal for a virtual world identity service that I've been typing away at uses OpenID, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OpenID Token Exchange to define a base set of interfaces and attributes for virtual world identity. In my opinion, there's a balancing act between asserting that virtual worlds add nothing new to the equation and nothing needs to be developed, and asserting that virtual worlds are an entirely new problem and throwing away the last decade or more of work.

John

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Christian Scholz [mailto:[e-mail]]
>Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 4:25 PM
>To: Hurliman, John
>Cc: [e-mail]
>Subject: Re: [mmox] The Story So Far...
>
>Hi!
>
>Hurliman, John schrieb:
>
>>
>> The agent domain concept takes several independent services (identity,
>presence, inventory) and lumps them together into a single trust domain.
>This inhibits the development of a widely distributed ecosystem like we
>find on the web today, and is really only convenient for large virtual
>world service providers that already have a vertical stack of services.
>It also drags in the assumption that there must be a backend
>communication layer between services such as inventory and simulation
>regions.
>
>Speaking of the web: There are already a lot of social networks out
>there which are right now going to work on interoperability regarding
>profile data, activity streams, authentication and general authorization
>(based on efforts like OAuth (now also here at IETF), OpenID,
>OpenSocial, PortableContacts, XRDS-Simple etc.).
>
>It would be great if these efforts can be integrated so that we don't
>have the problem in the end to bring web and virtual world together
>although both have basically the same idea of distributed services (and
>even partly the same services).
>
>So let me ask in the question: Is this of general interest for this
>group to try to bridge that web/VW gap as well?
>
>I think it would be of value because many of the protocols are already
>in use and thus are understood, have library support and so on.
>
>That being said IMHO the Agent Domain really could be far more separated
>into separate services. All you maybe need is one starting point for
>your identity and some service catalogue which lists where all the other
>services are, either your individual ones (where is my profile, where
>are my group memberships) or service level ones (where is the region
>info, which login methods do you support).
>
>-- Christian
>
>
>--
>Christian Scholz
>Blog: http://mrtopf.de/blog
>Company: http://comlounge.net
>Podcasts: http://datawithoutborders.net, http://openweb-podcast.de
>