After coming to a crescendo as key player in Liberty Alliance, AOL has disbanded the Magic Carpet product team and refocused limited resources on its core subscription and advertising businesses. This leaves the Internet giant with no viable alternative to Microsoft's Passport authentication service in implementation, which currently boasts 200 million accounts. As first reported by BetaNews, Magic Carpet was a unified single sign-on similar in concept to Passport. The system was to provide AOL with leverage to yield against Microsoft, and ostensibly bring forth a rich alternative to AOL's more than 35 million subscribers.
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