Dave Winer: Distributed membership and preferences. The frustration of decentralized systems, as expressed by many users of our software, is that it’s cumbersome to enter your information manually for every site you want to join. Isn’t there some way to automate this? Of course there is, but then we get into the issue of privacy, and that’s guaranteed to be a controversial issue.
While I’d like the convenience of a single logon/authentication system, I’m absolutely unwilling to trust Microsoft with this information. So any system that goes around the monopoly player is worth a try.