I’ve been fascinated with they way people use the internet more and more to extract their identity, to show the world who they are. The thing I see happening is that 13/14 year old teenagers build up online identities that, compared to most business users and their linkedin account, are so much more connected, complex and complete that I cannot imagine what this generation will be doing in 10 year.
With this topic keeping me busy I’ve been thinking how the eco-system around our online identity could evolve in near future.
Email address on steroids
Everyone will have a central online identity. You could look at this central identity as an email address on steroids. I’ll try to explain. Everyone that is online has at least one email address. This email address is very personal. People you know recognize you when they see your email address passing by. But not only people recognize you, machines do too. Every time you sign in to a website with your email address you are recognized.
Using an email address as online identity works pretty good on small scale. If you have dozen accounts on various websites it becomes a drag. Each website contains duplicate data of you and each website adds its own information to your online identity. Duplicate data is bad because having to change your hometown when you moved becomes a annoying task with a dozen accounts.
In itself It’s great that specialized websites add information to your online identity. The bad part is that most website take your data “hostage”. You provide them with your personal information but they don’t give you the option to share that information. They treat the data as their property when in fact it’s yours. This is a business model for many website by the way. Their value is defined by that amount of data they have extracted from their users. But more on that later
We need to turn this around. Only our trustworthy email address wasn’t really designed for this so we need something else. Something that gives you the same identity “feeling” as an email address but is extensible, flexible and provides more options for control. Looking at this we could end up the diagram below:
Central profile
Your central profile represents your online identity. This is a website that gives you the ability to manage basic identity data such as name, age, hometown, occupation, email address, etc. It’s also the place to manage what data you want to share and with who. It also might be an nice overall representation for the outside world of your identity. The central profile is they key to eliminating duplicate data, putting you in control and having a portable identity.
Identity Addons
Imaging one big interface to manage all the aspects of your identity. As your identity expands you’ll be looking at a screen that doesn’t make sense -even to you- in a very short time. Not only will this be a usibility nightmare but also who is going to implement all those cool features for managing specific aspects of your identity?
I’d say lets keep all those fancy third party websites that are designed for one specific goal. Flickr for instance is great to manage the “photo” aspect of your identity, Last.FM is great for keeping your taste of music up to date and managing that booklist on Amazon just works fine.
We can look at those third party sites as Identity Addons. They provide a friendly interface for managing specific aspects of your identity. These Addons will need to add the specific data to your central identity in an standardized way, sort of like plugins do for software.
I can even imaging that we won’t be choosing a site to share our photos but a “photo identity provider” that is an Addon to your identity in the near future.
Identity Readers
Having a extensible central identity that tells a lot more about you than an email address is great, but the first next thing you’ll want to do is to share (parts) of that identity. In the same way that Identity Addons add specific data to your identity they could also take advantage of the data you share with them. I call websites that make use of your shared identity data Identity Readers. The most basic use of an Identity Reader is to fetch data such as name, age, hometown, occupation, email address, etc. But using basic data is just the start. Having just one contact list that is used by different Identity Readers so that you won’t have to add all your friends on every new social site you sign up with is a more advanced -but very desirable- use.
Requirments
Ok, sounds cool until now right? So what are we waiting for? Why hasn’t anyone implemented this yet? First of all there are a few requirements in order to do this the right way:
- A central identity; an online place that represents your online identity. You fully trust and control this place.
- Identity standards; these standards define how is your identity data stored. They don’t (!) define an identity, just the way properties are stored.
- Data exchange standards; portability of your identity is crucial. Data must be able to flow from Identity addons to the central profile and from the central profile to Identity readers.
As we know defining standards takes time but my gust feeling tells me we’re almost there. We are a long way on the technology end that will enable this. I’m sure OpenId, hCard and microformats are things you’ll be hearing a lot more from in the near future.
But there is something else that was holding this development back. This setup is very much aimed at portability, having control over your data and having the choice to manage your data using the website you like. You can imagine that moving your data from Identity Addon provider #1 to provider #2 isn’t a very secure base to build a business. You could lose 50% of your users as Identity Addon provider when the next day a new startup pops out of the silicon valley sand with a better service then you. Of course we -as users- cheer this on as it pushes providers to compete on giving us the best service so that we don’t make the switch.
And now?
What is going to make this happen? Basically the vision, resources and endurance of a few brave. This development has been taking place for some time now but it’s getting more attention and picking on speed lately. Smart computer people (those with big glasses ;)), have been talking about this for some time now. We can thank Facebook that it put this development in the face of the mass crowd. What Facebook did was like saying “screw all those business models, we’ll open up everything and see what happens”.
It’s good to see more people thinking and writing about this development. I’ll be keeping an close eye on these developments as I’m sure they will dominate the web the next few years.
