OpenID
A long time ago I had some crazy idea I'd have time to work on a single sign on distributed identity system. Never happened. But I did register openid.net and openlogin.net around June 2001. They are near to expiration and have had a note offering them to anyone for a long time.
As luck would have it, Brad Fitzpatrick, of LiveJournal fame, started up a similar interesting looking project. They were looking for a name and managed to email me about openid.net right before I was going to offer it to them. So I gave it to them for the new and improved OpenID project.
There are lots of similar projects out there with lots of good ideas. None of them have taken hold on more than a few test sites if even that. Maybe the momentum behind LiveJournal will be enough that this system can grow and be actually used by various sites on the net. Hopefully their traditional OpenSource policies keep this stuff as open as possible.
I'll just chalk up giving away the domain as my community service act for the day.
Namespaces
Speaking of distributed id services... it has become seriously difficult to pick user ids on popular sites. It's really just a namespace problem where the entire world has to pick a short, cute, memorable nick at one central spot. See AIM, gmail, Yahoo!, /., IRC, and of course weblogging sites like LiveJournal. Just about any short nick related to your name, initials, or id you use elsewhere is bound to be taken along with 20 variations thereof. Would be so much easier to use email ids everwhere. Then at least the namespace bottleneck is limited to the current domain name namespace issues. Sigh.
I figured I'd register a LJ account just to try the OpenID ideas. Of course just about all the nicks I tried were taken. Oh well. So in the tradition of i18n and l10n names, I got d11n