[extension]

Don't be so quick to dismiss OpenID and other open data initiatives just because they haven't solved the problem overnight. They are making slow but steady progress, which is all that you can really ask for with such ambitious goals, and all that it takes to achieve them, if you have a little patience.

When I first got my OpenID, this site was the only use I could find for it. Then I could use it on Stackoverflow. Then I could use it to comment on half the blogs in the world with Disqus. And now I can use it with Facebook (somehow.. I haven't got that working yet). This is a remarkable amount of progress for about one year.

The big players are not as averse to this as you make them out to be. Google in particular seems to be open to the idea of open data. They are also making Wave which I could see having a huge democratizing effect on the internet.

I started developing for the web a decade ago and back then, the only way to "share" data from another site was to scrape it, and that was considered hostile. Now everyone has feeds and APIs and the open standards are clearly catching on. I've seen enough to convince me that this trend will continue until the technorati are satisfied. It may take another ten years but that'll do.