By Rachel Chalmers
Microsoft Corp has announced the broader availability of its Passport web registration service and the addition of an electronic wallet. Fifty internet sites have now pledged their support for Passport, which has been available since July on a number of MSN sites. In September, Microsoft named it as the first of a planned series of megaservices to be licensed for inclusion in third-party applications. The company wants to keep signing up new merchants, particularly in the weeks leading up to the holiday buying season.
Microsoft says rival electronic wallets offer only subsets of what Passport can do. Besides single sign-on and the electronic wallet, the service includes a set of mostly optional demographic information that can be used across multiple sites, though only those with a privacy policy. The server-side infrastructure also means users can gain access to their Passport no matter what device they’re using to access the internet.
Passport uses the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML) specification also supported by Microsoft rivals AOL, IBM and Sun, but Microsoft insists it has the edge in terms of user experience. At least Passport will be interoperable with other ECML wallets. What rivals fear, however, is that Microsoft will succeed in establishing its own service as the standard – moments before it begins taking a cut of every transaction.
