While himself is writing away (write like the wind! so we can go out in the sun!), I decided to set up Live Mesh. I'd followed the link they handed out at Web 2.0 but I knew from the Mesh team that those invites had all been used up (my guess: Microsoft provisioned for all the folk at the show but it wasn't a hard URL to guess even if you didn't find it in a blog). My signup was pending, but once you're in you can invite people and they get to join the Mesh straight away, so Simon invited me and shared his writing folder.

He sent it to the Live ID I use for my main email address, which for reasons of complexity is set to US locale and for reasons of me being a bear of little brain I can't remember the password for. I don't normally need to remember it because I have it linked to the Live ID I use all the time, which is my Hotmail address. After a couple of guesses I thought, 'let's see how smart Mesh is' and signed in with the main Live ID instead. Mesh accepted it. I could install the software (tiny) and see Simon's folder - but not his devices, so good separation. I added a folder that I don't have set up with SyncToy to replicate back to the server because the path isn't straightforward and as it has conference presentations it's useful for Simon on the road. But I didn't want to share it back to his Gmail account because I couldn't remember the email. He was in the process of linking his Live ID 's so I invited his main email account. And when he accepted the invitation while he was logged in with his other Live ID (still with me at the back?), it worked - all the linked Live ID 's have access to the Mesh they're supposed to have access to.

Now we have folders we can see and choose to sync from each other's machines. They sync quickly - and with placeholders for any files that haven't synced yet. Files are replicated into the cloud (up to 5GB) but if there's a direct path from my PC to Simon's the connection goes that way for speed and you can sync files over 5GB to another Mesh endpoint as long as it has the disk space.

If I don't want to sync the files to my PC because I don't need to have them, I just need to have access to them - I can see them online, through the Live Desktop - a browser window that shows me files and folders. I can open a file onto my PC or save it onto my PC or upload a file myself. This is the most idiot-proof syncing and sharing system I've ever seen and I speak as a bona fide idiot before my first cup of coffee.

I can think of so many ways to use this - and this is just the demonstration app. What matters is that underlying synchronisation layer. I want Flickr to be a Mesh endpoint so I never explicitly use an uploader again; I just mark a folder for sync and every image with a 5-star rating goes up (or maybe every image goes up but the rated ones go in a set). I want this to sync OneNote notes to my phone (Windows Mobile and Nokia clients are on the way). I'd quite like it as a way of doing posts from my mobile to LiveJournal - it would leave me an archive that could also be synced to the Semagic archive folder for local backup. It will mean that when Simon downloads videos he doesn't have to move them onto the NAS by hand. A universal list of the widgets I like and what basic settings I want them to have for every new widget platform to snarf up instead of me saying 'Weather: London, San Jose, Seattle, Christchurch' by hand every time.

Yep. There may be heartbreak and throwing of china in my future (What do you mean you don't like mapped drives? Mapped drives are very important to me!) but for now, Live Mesh is my new shiny.

Hey - I like it enough not to save all this until I get paid to write about it!

Three little words that send shivers down your spine: government IT project...

All 14-year-old children in England will have their personal details and exam results placed on an electronic database for life under a plan to be announced tomorrow... Officials said last night that the introduction of the unique learner number (ULN)was not a step towards a national identity card...The new database — which will store a “tamper-proof CV” — will be known as MIAP (managing Information Across Partners). To be registered on the new database every 14-year-old will be issued with a unique learner number. Unlike the current unique pupil number now given to children in school but destroyed when they leave, the ULN will be used by government agencies to track individuals until they retire. Ultimately, it will create a numbered database for every citizen aged 14-plus in the UK.

OK, it's from the Times so it may not be accurate but I just love the idea of a tamper-proof CV - and the way it will shut down most of the more venal recruitment consultants... I don't think I need to say why the database itself is a bad idea, not to mention unnecessary as everyone posts all those details on FaceBook anyway...

I like the idea of disclosing just as much about myself as I want and no more; of proving membership of a class rather than having my personal membership of the class validated, of proving I'm over 21 rather than giving my exact age. I'm certainly getting enough experience of providing identity claims as part of dealing with my mother's estate. I'm already very interested in the various Identity 2.0 systems that are coming through and the Identity Mixer is the first thing IBM has contributed to the new wave. Higgins and CardSpace are often perceived as competition and there are tensions between IBM and Microsoft that make them different directions, but for the developer and for the end user they're going to be pieces that sit side by side and get mixed up. Roll on the abstraction of identity functionality for the Internet.

Age, shoe size: IBM thinks you should only disclose as much of your identity as you want; read the rest of my piece on Developer Register

Well, it is an identity metasystem...

Confused about how the emerging identity standards and systems fit together and which to work with? You're not alone. There's a lot of talk – and quite a few demos – of interoperable identity systems, but how do you know how well they really fit together? That's what the ITU focus group on identity management was set up to thrash out: read what the chairman told me about the group at Dev Reg

Last year I contributed to an 'anonymous' column for PC Plus called The Insider. I was going to keep the secret, but I just spotted one of my columns on the PC Plus Web site, with my name on; funnily enough it's one about identity!

Kim Cameron is Microsoft’s identity architect. He’s embarrassed to be called a ‘Microsoft official’. He won an award for knowing that technology has to work in the real world. And he can’t cope with a single extra password so he’s come up with a password-free system for proving your identity that will start showing up in Windows soon. Read on...

I've written a lot about developments in identity systems this year; this time I've been writing not about new features but about old problems and whether the new approaches will make a difference. It turns out that some of the old systems provide good principles. If someone changes the address on your credit card but not the address you've set with an online identity provider, the credit card company can cross-check with your preferred address - or they can just choose to trust you. The less information a company keeps, the fewer liability issues. Small pieces, widely distributed; stealing all of my identity would be like a treasure hunt. Plus, why Dale Olds from Novell thinks identity might be the wrong word to use for all of this: read on at Developer Register...

I have to like a site that mocks the -r convention of Web 2.0 sites but I also really like being able to see who at a conferenec comes from where using Attendr. We're going to need a 'MyPlace' microformat for embedding the map view we want of ourselves in our profiles along with our geocode to plug straight into these kinds of sites instead of entering the information from scratch each time. How about having it as an InfoCard property, to give me control of where it gets used and for what...

Another identity piece on DevReg: Secure identity begins at home (it will have my name as the author soon, honest). This time I'm looking at Intel's ideas for security identity at the PC level, building into the platform - which for Intel means the CPU+chipset+services, like VIIV or vPro rather than PC+OS. I think it's interesting that we're more comfortable with Intel adding secure partitions to the PC than we were with the idea of Microsoft doing it.

In March, we caught up with Jon Callas (CTO of PGP Corporation) and had a very interesting discussion about identity versus security versus authorisation vs access. Some of the most interesting things Jon had to say are preserved in a piece I've just done for The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/21/pgp_update/). Did you know Skype is a big PKI? Pieces like this are ripe to plug into an identity metasystem that crosses the streams.

Two pieces published yesterday, one in the Developer Register, the other in the FT Digital Business section, one about Higgins and the attempt to simplify the way developers work with identity, the other about the horrible state of the average inbox and what Marc Smith, Microsoft's research sociologist, thinks software should do about it.

Higgins is one of the interesting individual developments in identity that will go to make up an identity metasystem; enough small pieces and I won't have to call it Kim Cameron's idea for an identity metasystem, or designate it in any way because it will be widespread enough to really be a metasystem. Breaking identity up into little pieces tightly managed is one of those ideas it's easy to dismiss because it's a big thing; everyone has to play if it's going to work because it has to work with everything. It's like my childhood reaction to learning about communism; 'what a nice idea, it's a shame people aren't actually like that' (a hardened cynic by the age of 11). TCP and printer drivers were big ideas; one of them won because it was obviously a better solution, one because it made things easier for users and developers. (Guess which I think is which!). There are enough people and pieces and players and financial penalties coming together that we might get Identity 2.0. I'll be writing more about this for DevReg, covering Intel Research's project and what PGP is up to these days.

SNARF is one of those nifty tools that can dig you out of a hole (I'll point it at the email I skimmed whilst travelling in case I missed anything crucial) but it's only a prototype done to find out what people need. The nice thing about that is that if baby steps are useful, bigger lessons might be another big shift. The principle I took from my AI degree was that we don’t know enough about why we work the way we do to emulate or simulate it usefully, but we do know enough to start making interfaces that make it easier to work the way we do.

Marc Smith is hugely fun to talk to and a joy to interview, because he comes out with lines like No one is giving me more heartbeats per day or more minutes; there is no Moore’s Law for humans. I am not becoming twice as intelligent and half as cheap; if anything the cost is going up and I’m slowing down."

If you leave a company, you lose your company email address. One of the things sbisson is covering in the phone interviews filling his days is how companies can keep ownership of official IM addresses in the same way. Here's a question for my PR friends. Do clients ever want to own the PR email contact for their company, so they can have continuity when they change clients? Do they see PRCONTACT@MyCompany.com as a valuable address? Or better yet NAME@MyCompanyPRTeam.com to make it really clear and avoid any confusion about information tht goes to all employees and information that doesn't. Do they see their space in my contact book as something of value to them, or something that it's my job and the job of the new incumbent to keep up to date? At least once a year I have to rummage around to find out who has the account for Company X now, and sometimes I find out the day after my copy goes in.

Researching a piece on InfoCard, the identity metasystem and the laws of identity and catching up on Kim Cameron's IdentityBlog, I spotted a familiar name; there are some people I keep coming across in the industry and Sam Sethi is one of them. Tracking him down led me to another calendar site, www.eventful.com. Again it's metadata slice and dice, with an emphasis on venues as much as events, so I can see what's on at the Mountain View Computer History Museum. Interesting, but unsatisfying. The search does better on CA than California - I think they should be a synonym. I'd like to see more grouping within results. It comes up with 4330 events in California for March; I'd like to be able to explore those by week or day or geographical region or event type or other finer grain information rather than just sorting them and paging through them a dozen at a time. There's a good mix of events though it's rather flooded with recurring events at Borders & Barnes and Noble. The tag cloud on the front of the site makes it look teen-oriented, I'm not sure what criteria the 'Sort by relevance' uses and my impression is 'interesting information, not enough tools '. When I'm browsing rather than searching, I still need to be able to narrow things down. I can't quite find the kind of events I want; the tag cloud is a mix of high level and low level and I suppose the fact that it doesn't make it easy to find the broad groupings of events I'm after may mean that the site doesn't have events of the kind I'm after (neat, mainly technology-oriented things to do in California in the first half of March).