OpenID
Brad Fitzpatrick: Yadis is now OpenID, and we’ll soon have OpenID.net. (The previous owner, David Lehn, gave it to us!) Props to Randy for the sexy logo! Join the mailing list (still named yadis) if you want to help with all this. We need programmers of all types for clients and servers.
It looks like the key design point of this approach is that there is no centralized registration. None. If you have a webserver, can add something like the following to your template, and either can run a CGI script or know somebody who can run one for you, then you are in.
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.livejournal.com/misc/openid.bml" />
This design is also explicitly not trying to compete with the “big boys”. In particular, it has no notion of trust.
Ben Hyde shares some more thoughts.
I’ve made a few initial postings to the mailing list:
While I doubt that this will have an appreciable impact on spammers, if integrated with some sort of buddy list, and if it is made seamless enough, it could allow people who want to author pages that “mom can’t see” an effective way to do so - without requiring that all of your buddies run the same software or sign up for the same service.