Today there was a burst of great Identity news from Microsoft: I don't know from where to start!!! :-)

• The Open Specification Promise (OSP) welcomes under its umbrella the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile. If you are not familiar with the OSP, the bottom line is that an open source project or a vendor may create an identity selector and not worry about patent concerns or royalties for the technologies covered by the specification. Neat!
• Shibboleth announced a partnership with Microsoft for supporting CardSpace & compatible identity selectors. Our own Mike had a big part in it: hear from the man himself here
• It's Relying Party frenzy!!! Microsoft is starting Open Source projects for creating RP supporting code on Java, PHC, Ruby and C. OOOK, maybe some of you could not believe his own eyes so I better repeat/expand. Quoting the press release: "These projects will implement software for specifying the Web site’s security policy and accepting information cards in: Java for Sun Java System Web Server or Apache Tomcat or IBM’s Websphere® Application Server, Ruby on Rails™, and PHP for the Apache Web server. An additional project will implement a C Library that may be used generically for any Web site or service.". This is crazy!!! Bad crazy or good crazy? GOOD CRAZY!!!! :-) You can touch those projects with your own hands at http://informationcard.sourceforge.net/, http://rubyforge.org/projects/informationcard/, http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardjava and http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardruby

This is very good stuff. Those are very interesting times :-)