Next big thing: Web Authentication API
I'm pretty sure one next big thing will be web authentication API available from many well-known websites. Yahoo offers such thing, but only for Flickr users.
Today Google released their account authentication, but only for 'installed applications'. Web applications will follow sometime this month (hopefully).
What this means? They are offering web based authentication against accounts created on their servers. This way an user doesn't need to create a separate account on other site, they can authenticate using an account he already have. These open many possibilities, especially for big websites, which I'm almost sure at a point will open this authentication process to everyone who want to use, as long as they own user accounts. For users, it's much easier to maintain only a few accounts, available from many other places.
Something like this wanted to be passport.net from Microsoft, available mainly for different Microsoft sites.
I'll closely see how these will develop, because I'm very interested using these authentication APIs. [digg it]