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BTW: I am in the developer preview but I haven't received the invite for the real thing. I asked to the others in the sandbox but it doesn't look like there's any invite being received so far.

PS: can anyone please edit the URL and remove the '#' at the end? It's caused by the FriendFeed bookmarklet and may lead to duplicate entries.

I didn't say the Internet is broken because authentication is a pain. I said the Web has been created to deal (and access) hypertexts. Nowadays the WWW is used for much more. People use it to shop, keep contacts with friends living far away, some use it to share their "lives" and the current state of art is far from being functional to the scope. To my personal point of view, it is broken by design when it comes to these scopes. And far from me trying to say there should be just a social network.

The gateway I idealize is not a giant bucket (or a silo) you'd fill with your stuff, that's exactly what I want to avoid. The "gateway" would just be a place you use to authenticate and authorize apps to access subsets of your data. Some of it (anagraphical data for the most part) would be stored on the gateway, and other stuff would be in much more appropiate places. Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, et cetera. The model I idealize would be a common layer to build thing on, nothing more and nothing less.

In regards to 2., you are right but today the same risk is multiplied on dozens of websites that I know basically nothing about. I don't know how they store and backup my stuff and I don't know how they deal it.

As per 4. OpenID and OAuth DO work (I use them a lot), what I tried to say is that they do not solve the underlying issue.

I really enjoyed it