I’m trying to write up a rather in-depth analysis of online identity, which has become a particularly heated subject for both political and business reasons. I’ve been drawn to the subject because there are many deep questions being asked considering openness and ownership of one’s identity online. Opening networks has been a particularly sticky point since social networks each grew up on their own standards, with larger networks pushing their own standards.
Facebook is chief among services pushing their own standards, namely because they are the only large site that even has a robust set of standards that programmers can use. Google is apparently a contender for being the other open system.
I define online identity as the sum total of all content about yourself online. This material can be contributions of your own and others either explicitly or implicitly linked to your “real world” persona.
These contributions most commonly come in the form of various accounts with websites across the web. I’ve decided to take a look at website accounts on the web, break them down and explore the difficulties each poses to an open system.
Here’s a rough outline of the elements of your identity on these sites:
- Authentification - This is the layer that enforces ownership over an account and at times verifies the true identity of a user. BBAuth would be a great solution if everyone didn’t mind having a Yahoo splash page before users signed in. OpenID would work if its inner workings were more obfuscated from users.
- Biographical Data - These are the data points of a profile that serve as the “stamp” of your identity. Similar to what Profilebuilder is trying to build.
- Contributed Content - These are the creative works you have contributed to the service. This is a particularly sticky area of ownership as Flickr members have found. However, it is one of the most rapidly developing areas with services opening access to their publicly accessible content through APIs.
- Connections - These are the connections you make with other users in your program’s ecosystem, such as contact lists. These connections often exist only in a particular ecosystem and are lost even if the above elements are moved to another service. XFN is taking on this problem, but the microformat is a needlessly obfuscated system that doesn’t work for the average user.
Thoughts, from anyone dropping by?
More to come…
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Nick,
Since I referenced this post in an email I just sent you, I’ll provide some thoughts here.
As I think about the problem of where to store all of this data (online identity), I see a world evolving where people have their own place on the web, and from there they connect out to the various sites that they use. Right now, this seems like a long time away. For the average person it’s still way too difficult to set up their own web page and get it hosted somewhere.
However, you can certainly imagine a world in which setting up an online identity (e.g. your own site) is as easy as ordering phone service. When it’s that easy, then everyone will have their own “portal” site — fully configurable with modules of other websites that can be plugged in. As I’m imaging it, a persons online identity shifts from proprietary sites (like all of the social networks out there) to a much more personalized “home” on the web. Maybe using the .name TLD. If the government got involved it could house all of your social security and passport info. Of course the issue then becomes about security — and we know there are lots of companies working to solve that problem. Can anyone say “chips imbedded into humans? Ohhh — think of all of the ethical issues!
Anyway, some food for thought.
- Matt
December 6th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
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December 18th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
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