{"id":640,"date":"2006-11-15T11:37:52","date_gmt":"2006-11-15T19:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=640"},"modified":"2006-11-15T11:39:31","modified_gmt":"2006-11-15T19:39:31","slug":"bill-barnes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=640","title":{"rendered":"Bill Barnes is CardCarrying"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill  Barnes is more responsible for crafting the Cardspace user experience than anyone on our team.  Now, he's not only working on next generation Cardspace, but tackling the user experience issues that arise when integrating InfoCards into web sites (e.g. “how to build a relying party?”.  Of course, this is an on-going project and – great news – he'll be using his new CardCarrying<\/a> blog to express his thinking and develop ideas.  For those interested in InfoCards, this is a “must-subscribe”.  Here's his take on what he's doing: <\/p>\n

Information Cards are a new approach to digital identity. So new that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve noticed an interesting phenomenon \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in the hundred or so times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve presented our idea, to audiences of all kinds, it always takes the better part of an hour to convey. Sometimes more. And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a good speaker.<\/p>\n

This shouldn't be surprising. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re new, and one would expect the concepts to take a while to sink in. I remember the first time I saw the World Wide Web, then just a few months old. I just didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it. My friend did a very admirable job as visionary, but it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t click. Same thing with TiVo. Again, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not dumb, not that dumb anyway, but new ideas take a while to filter in.<\/p>\n

And Information Cards have it worse. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not just new, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re different, and different is harder. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just have to learn, you have to unlearn. This helps explain why security experts often take the longest to grasp what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re forcing them to go back to first principles, and for many of them that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long way back. But even my mom has to unlearn passwords, and that won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen instantly.<\/p>\n

I love to talk, I do. So I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind speaking for the better part of an hour if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what it takes to get someone up to speed. But I have two jobs. My busy schedule simply won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allow me to teach Information Cards to every man, woman, and child on the Internet today. How are we going to educate them? More to the point, how will website X, which thinks supporting Information Cards will garner more customers from increased security and convenience, educate them?<\/p>\n

The good news is, not everyone needs to understand the end-to-end meta-architecture. They just need to understand what they need to make it work. One of the reasons we adopted the Card metaphor was that it brings with it some intuition. Hopefully, then, a given website won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to do very much explanation.<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I think they need to know, in language that I am continuing to develop. My hope is that, with these few key concepts under their belt, the flow of the website plus the user experience of their identity selector, be it Windows CardSpace or a competitor, will be clear enough to take them the rest of the way. So, without further ado:<\/p>\n

Information Cards are like digital versions of the cards in your wallet. You can make personal cards for signing in to websites \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they are like passwords but are much harder to steal. Personal cards are stored on your computer, and you can use a single card to sign into multiple websites.<\/p>\n

You can also download managed cards from organizations like banks, associations, and businesses. When you want to prove something about yourself to a website, for instance \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am a member of club X\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I work for company Y\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, show that website a managed card. A managed card is stored on your computer, but the information it conveys is not.<\/p>\n

These are the key points I think people need to understand. And the second part, managed cards, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessary if your site doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take managed cards, and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most of them out of the gate. So really it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one paragraph, three sentences, four or five concepts.<\/p>\n

Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong, I think four or five concepts is a lot, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t expect everyone to get it right away. I think inevitably what will happen is that a small group of geeks will learn these concepts deeply, and start to evangelize them in the blogosphere, in media, and to their parents. A good analogy here is RSS. My experience in that hardly anyone outside the technorati knows what it is yet, and very few people will bootstrap themselves simply by seeing that magic orange square. Conversions happen one at a time, from one satisfied (and informed) customer to another. My mom will use Information Cards because I tell her why she should.<\/p>\n

I have heard some other great ideas about educating people. More on these later. Meanwhile, let me know how you would educate a user at your website on what Information Cards are, and why they should use them at your website. Would you use my language or a variant thereof? Share the love.<\/p>\n

Oh, one more thing. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not speaking in an official capacity here, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reasonable to expect Microsoft or anyone else to mount a giant P.R. education campaign on Information Cards, any more than you would expect them or anyone else to convince you to use RSS. If it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really a good technology (and I think it is) it will succeed because it is in everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s benefit when it is used. So I think everyone shares the educational burden. So get teaching.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bill thinks back to the very first time he saw the World Wide Web, then just a few months old, and recalls, “I just didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,15,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}