Microsoft snaps up identity expert

10.12.2008

He also said he relished the opportunity to come in and work with his "Foo Camp friends Jon Udell, Dana Boyd and of course Ray Ozzie." Foo Camp is an annual hacker event put on by O'Reilly Media.

Hardt, most recently the chair of Sxipper, a position he will retain, comes in at a time when Microsoft is working to marry its newly minted identity strategy with its services push.

Sxipper was a spin-off from Sxip Identity, where Hardt first began to gain notice in the identity community with his rapid-fire Identity 2.0 . Sixp Identity developed a technology called Sxip Access, which Google used as the foundation of a single sign-on bridge to . Sxip later sold the technology to . 

In addition to his identity background, Hardt also has worked extensively with open source. He founded ActiveState in 1997 and developed tools for open source programming languages, and he ported the Perl programming language to Windows.

In February, he showed off for the first time his to create "address book 2.0," a social networking "flow application" that presents a user's contact data in context with what they are viewing on the Internet.