Facebook’s mail as a replacement for e-mail and a replacement for OpenID
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Ideas, Web2.0
Jul|30|2007
A while back I wrote about how Facebook could become the defacto Identity 2.0 provider for a lot of people if OpenID doesn’t get their game up, the post has been getting some great hits and some interest from some great people as well. Gotta love them internets.
Facebook mails better than e-mail
Recently Dave Duarte mentioned how he sees Facebook killing e-mail. While I don’t agree with him on it (Facebook has a terrible mail interface), it did get me thinking about mail and identity differently than before. Facebook e-mail isn’t really e-mail. You aren’t sending a mail to a name@domain.com anymore, you are actually sending the mail to a person as opposed to an e-mail address, which is a total paradigm shift essentially when you think of anonymity on the net. I recently received a mail from someone after a presentation I did at a backpacking conference, almost 2 months ago. The guy must have looked me up on Facebook and sent me a message (note even the language is different).
Previously, I was a lost entity. There was no place that he could have looked up my contact details except through a tedious process of calling the organisers (ok, only tedious for me…) if it wasn’t in the conference pack. Lucky for us, in trots the hero of the day, Facebook. The attendee can now simply do a quick search for me, I can recognise him if I spoke to him and we can quickly strike up the conversation where we left off. The most important part here is that we never had to exchange e-mail addresses. He could contact me as if he was walking up to me - no need to need a secret pass-key (e-mail address), or keep that ever elusive business card.
E-mail as it should be
And this is the way that we should move towards communication. I want to see some sort of identity provider that someone can search for and find my details (currently Google does that for me…) But there should not be one ID provider, there should be many (echoing the ideas of Malcom Gladwell and his TED spaghetti sauces presentation) and it should be open. You’ll remember I mentioned the great talk by Dick Hardt (back in 2005 mind you) where he asks how do you replicate your ID document online, but not only yours, you need to replicate the ID of South Africa, Botswana, America, Thailand, Greece, Morocco, Denmark, etc etc. and they all need to talk to each other in an understandable way. When you walk up to the bottle store in America and you show them your SA ID document, how do they know you are over 21? They trust your ID document.
But I’m straying again - previously e-mail was a pretty good measure/keeper of your identity. Some registration processes used to (and many still do) require you to login with your e-mail address. What kind of a sure-fire identity system is that? I can go and create 50 different ones and then create 50 more using any of the free e-mail services, or I can send the confirmation mail to an anonymous mail client like Mailinator. The fact is that e-mail is and never was a good identity provider, so why are we sticking to it? Because it’s the only weak one we have.
But now Facebook has broken past both of these barriers (geekyness from OpenID, and easily forged for e-mail). I’ve said before that I believe Facebook to be very secure. I don’t believe that Facebook will see that many sex predators (if any) as Myspace because it is such a good identity provider (you can’t fake your friends).
I’d love to get to the day that people don’t ask me what my e-mail address is but simply send me a message (and not in the sense of “Ya cool, I’ll add you as a friend on Facebook”). I have no idea how this would work, but that is what all those smart people are out there for.
Technorati Tags: identity 2.0, openid, facebook, e-mail, message, identity
12 Responses
Simon Back
30|Jul|2007Hey Uno,
Nice post.
I was wondering, how much have your looked into Second Life. I definitely reckon its blogworthy. I heard about the program/platform/site last year sometime, and now I see it is making some more mainstream press.
Whats your opinion on Second Life.
Simon Back
Uno
30|Jul|2007Hey Simon,
I haven’t had time to check out Second Life, it’s come up in the other blogs I read and a lot of people are predicting the decline of Second Life as a marketing tool - The returns just aren’t good enough to warrant the investment of time and effort.
Still, I think it’s a great new disruptive technology.
Simon Back
30|Jul|2007What do you mean when you say ‘disruptive technology’?
Uno
30|Jul|2007Technology that has the potential to change the way we do things. Cellphones are disruptive, Social networks are as well, blogs, even eye-glasses were to an extent (they lifted productivity levels)
Identity 2.0 » Blog Archive » Facebookâs mail as a replacement for e-mail and a replacement for ...
31|Jul|2007[…] here: Uno Identity […]
warren
31|Jul|2007facebook as a replacement for open id? naaa, i think that would be a terrible idea…
the most appealing thing about open id is that it reflects the fragmented nature of real world identity. the persona i maintain at work is different to the persona i maintain with mates is different to the persona i maintain with friends. open id is built to reflect that.
facebook however, is pretty two dimensional. you can specify the type of relationship you have with friends, but thats about it. the limited profile provides some flexibility but still falls way short of how our real world relationships work.
i’ve recieved friends requests from people i haven’t heard from in ages and it’s great to be in touch again, but then i’ve also had them from people who i don’t particularly feel like sharing my everyday life with. it’s a very binary system.
facebook’s success has been phenomenal but this is not due to any real innovation of it’s own. it’s merely polished and repackaged the myspace buzz and made it acceptable for everyone else to use. it’s it’s success fuelled a network effect, and it’s value is based almost solely on the fact that ‘all my friends are on facebook’
the facebook platform is a good move, but still is still essentially a walled garden, so all the time and effort you’ve spent maintaining an identity is lost once the herd moves on to the ‘next big thing’…
so in a choice between centralized or distributed identity, facebook vs open id, open id is definately the way of the future…
Armand du Plessis
01|Aug|2007Hi Uno,
Further to our off-line discussion and probably more applicable to your previous post but here is some more thoughts on this.
OpenID is the ideal solution for ‘Identity2.0′ because it really decouples “you” from the provider of all your information. Depending on the provider I can have Facebook providing my personal information and demographics, Linked-In providing my resume and last.fm providing my music preferences.
Should Facebook lose face I switch to someone else providing that information for me but this process of change is transparent to the Relying Parties or websites where I need to use that information. You keep a single OpenID which represents you but where you choose to maintain the actual information is up to you. Using microformats in your OpenID identity exchange makes this entirely feasible.
At the moment most Identity Providers maintain this information themselves which I believe is the wrong approach. You should choose where to delegate different parts of your identity to which information to include in which personas.
OpenID allows you selectively disclose information to requesting parties so you’re not in danger of providing a link to your Facebook profile which contains pictures of you drunk at the office party to a possible employer. Instead the persona and information you disclose can be sourced from Linked-In and the persona you use your more ‘official’ version.
OpenID2 and the Identity Metasystem initiatives is going a long way towards making this possible and it’s just up to providers to step up to the plate and make it simple enough so people actually start questioning sites which don’t support it.
Uno
01|Aug|2007Thanks Warren and Armand:
While I don’t think anyone has been disputing that OpenID is the best platform to use, what myself and Jeremiah have been saying is that it is still too difficult to understand. Hopefully once we have more people using it in innovative ways we’ll start seeing normal people adopting it.
I really want people to use OpenID as opposed to Facebook as their ID provider, I’m just unsure how!
Armand du Plessis
01|Aug|2007What I was trying to get at was that everything is in place to make both possible. The two should be complementary and not exclusive.
Where I’m going with the identitu.de prototype is that it will allow you to use your OpenID but selectively choose where it sources your information from. Whether that be Facebook or another source, you should be able to select which entity is authoritative for which part of your 2.0 identity profile and that process should be transparent to anyone depending on you to provide identity information. Supplemental, not a replacement.
Uno
01|Aug|2007Yeah that would be pretty cool to use. As we said, you want to use sites that manage your info best to manage it. Facebook is still too much of a walled garden for me to trust them with my resume etc.
Minnaar
01|Aug|2007Well it seems Stellenbosch IT has finally blogged the wonder called facebook. Despite it beautifully efficient code it has managed to drag our network to a crawl. Im not to happy about it - I mean I already pay quite a bit for Inetkey, and who are they to decide? I guess its that whole academic use policy thing. Guess I will have to switch to m.facebook.com from my phone.
(de)railed » Blog Archive » Social Networks vs Identity Providers
07|Aug|2007[…] to Uno’s blog where he has two posts, “Facebook is now the new OpenID” and “Facebook as an replacement for email and OpenID“. I agree with most of the points there including the fact that at the moment OpenID and […]
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