Services anywhere, anytime, and anyhow?

We all have different kinds of computing devices; desktop computers, laptops, handtops, PDA devices, mobile phones, you name it. All these devices offer different kinds of usage patterns and allow accessing services in different ways. What would be really cool is to have the services be available, in a way or another, for all the devices capable of producing content for those services. Confusing? Maybe, so let's have an example.

I have multiple devices for taking pictures. Or for producing content for blogs. For instance, I take pictures with my Ixus digital camera or my mobile phone. I also write content to blogs using desktop/laptop computers and mobile phone. How could all these be integrated in such a way that for instance I could take a picture with my mobile phone, attach some text to it easily, maybe include some context data, and finally post the whole thing to my blog? Well, one way could be to first take the picture and upload it to some online picture album, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb. Then I would write the text, and upload it to the blog. Finally, I would attach the picture from the online picture album to the blog, and maybe tag the blog entry with some context-enabling keywords. Quite complicated?

At the moment, interfaces to all the services, or parts of them, are provided by different service providers. Flickr allows uploading pictures with various ways, and with various devices. Similarly, blog providers allow inserting entries with different kinds of interfaces; web upload, email, etc. What is missing is the real "glue" between all these, so that I could have a client from which I could just aggregate the service access with some nice way. Maybe Semantics and Web services, or preferably a combination of them - Semantic service composition - would provide an answer to this?

Liberty-enabled Google, Flickr, ...

When I'm logging into my blog, the Blogger Beta redirects me to the Google authentication, which usually just notices that I'm already logged in, and then redirects back to the Blogger Beta. Sounds familiar? I must admit that I don't know the details about how this really works, but it would seem like it could make use of Liberty technologies; Google authentication would act as IdP and all the other (Google) servies, including Blogger Beta, would act in the role of a SP?

Another thing is the integration of Blogger and Flickr. That is, you can post pictures from Flickr to Blogger. Now, if I remember correctly, the "linking" of these accounts required that you will get some sort of authentication token from Google authentication for Flickr. Flickr then uses this token (including credentials for posting to Blogger) when it sends pictures to the Blogger.

In fact, Flickr resembles IdP as well. If you would like to post pictures from other applications/web sites, you have to fetch an authentication token from them, and then inject this token into your posting application, which then presents it to the Flickr every time you post pictures with it. I would love to see Liberty taking care of all this!