STRAIGHTENING OUT OUR NAMING

Well, it's a good thing I read Pamela Dingle's blog or I might have missed out on this breaking news: 

Aha!

Looks like Microsoft has released the official name of their Infocard windows client — Windows Cardspace. Well I'm not sure if it's official, but somebody from MS has blogged about it, so that's good enough for me (-:

I like the name – it is catchy and will be easy for help desk personnel around the world to refer to. It is also Googleable, and it doesn't have the terrible generic sound that 99% of the big stack mentality monster corps seem to be blindly adhering to these days (ie ). If it had been MS Card Manager or MS Identity Manager, I would have been very unimpressed (-:

It also solves the question of – “InfoCard” vs “InfoCards” as the official name, and it is also now easy to know whether you are talking about the client or a single card.

The same blog entry also talks about the new name for WinFX – go check it out, I wouldn't want to ruin all the surprises…

Nice work y'all, I bet it feels good to get to this milestone!

Thanks Pamela.  I like it too.  I would like to congratulate the Department of Naming, which turns out to be as able to party as anyone, for coming up with something so close to the spirit of what we are about.   

As Pamela says, I think this will go a long way towards reducing the confusion between Microsoft's client piece (what is now called Windows Cardspace) and InfoCards – the things that you see in your Windows Cardspace or your Linux Identity Selector or your mobile phone.  The word ‘InfoCards’ is still just a placeholder of course, but it's clearly different from “Windows Cardspace”. 

Speaking of which, someone pointed out Pamela's blog has not been in my blogroll (it is now!).  Which is ridiculous because she's doing such good stuff.  Just as bad, Johannes de Beer pointed out my spelling of Johannes Ernst's name has been wrong for, er, about a year.  And I know Johannes discreetly mentioned it once (blush), and that I fixed it and then it somehow reverted during an update (hand wave, gurgle).  So apologies all around – it's what comes from having this darn day job.