I found this photo of Mike Jones on Esther Dyson's Flickr account via Marc Canter. (How come Flickr doesn't accept trackbacks and this triple-threat deep linking stuff is exhausting, where is the plug-in to track the links back themselves so I can cut-n-paste and move on?)

Here's the text below the photo:

...While other vendors talk about identity management and worry about the issues of privacy and portability and federation, Userplane manages about 1.5 million user IDs that it now wants to federate (at their option, with real-time presence management) *across* its partner sites. That is, if you have a Userplane user ID, you can see when your friends are online... or you can see when they are online at a particular site where they have logged in. Presence now combines with remote virtual location info.... and will generate interesting permutations: Whom do you want to see where? *Do* you really want to have the same identity across multiple sites? Some people will say yes all the time; some will say no all the time; and some will make different choices for different locations and for different friends.

And you thought *taxes* were complicated!

Technorati Tags: userplane, webchat, identity