Dick Hardt, the guy who sort of helped kickstarted OpenID and had that awesome presentation, has blogged about an abbreviated history of identity systems. It’s a pretty good read if you want to understand since when the whole Identity 2.0 thing has been coming – and how Microsoft might actually have been on the forefront of the movement, but did it in a sucky way.
The part that struck me most, and what I believe is really important for the web, is that we are seeing the web mature more. I posted about signs of a maturing web earlier in reference to more complex advertising and how digital advertising is coming into its own.
What Facebook Connect will mean is that we’ll see your real identity commenting on this blog and moving with you on the web. Which says a lot. OpenID is a cool way to do that already, you can create a profile and sign-on easily, but how do I know that it’s really you? Current commenting systems suck even more at this.
For example, here we have Nelson Mandela commenting on the Facebook Connect post on Quirk’s blog:
Many services have been suffering from a similar problem – fake or multiple identities. 24.com regularly suffers from spammy comments and Muti has also gained flak for allowing people to register multiple profiles (and thereby game the system).
Magnolia has an interesting way of getting around some of these problems – you can’t register an account with an email address (as these are quite disposable), you can only register with a select group of services. While this doesn’t directly solve the issue of identity, it was one of the first services that I saw that used a type of Facebook Connect before there was a Facebook Connect.
Now. What we’ll see is more of this, better identity with Real People in commenting. Real Identity. And this is why the web is maturing even more. It’s moving away from the geeky world of AcidBurn76 commenting on everything, to a more mature web where you are responsible. I find this exciting because it also opens up the opportunity for web communities to flourish more.
(As a side note, Facebook is the first service that has managed to get probably everyone to use their real name to sign up. It’s quite incredible really.)
I totally agree with you with the fact that the web is on a maturity curve.
The problem is not many people are willing to use openid, (maybe it coz of ignorance)or is it that it has not been marketed properly.
What are your thoughts on possible passing on of info and profiles of users to third party marketers, what controls should be there, if any?
I think the only thing that concerns me is interoperability of many competing identity systems OR Facebook preventing other networks from using their system may actually put another stumbling block in the way of mass adoption.
In many ways, if this works well then it makes the situation difficult; many less technologically literate people will find it useful that they can use their FB details on other sites, which encourages the idea to flourish in the mainstream but if you’re not on Facebook, will this actually either force you to use Facebook in order to have an identity in this sense or present a segregated identity market?
I’d like to see how this one pans out!
This becomes all the more interesting in light of Microsoft introducing live search into Facebook. If Facebook does become standard and so can muscle people into joining, that would suddenly give Microsoft more search power. I too would like to see how it pans out.
If you are a reader of “Beeld” then you would have noticed a couple of weeks ago in one of the letters printed by the newspaper publisher, that blindly using social utilities such as facebook leaves footprints of a kind that can get you fired, not hired by potential employers or even humiliated nationally – as that stupid writer whose letter was published found out.
Even if your profile settings are set to very secure it can still be accessed if all your friends are dumb enough not to secure their own profiles. Each application you add to your facebook creates a hackable footprint that has the potential of ruining your life if you dare misbehave or say something you were not supposed to.
Social utility programs just creates a new form of Big Brother to track and watch your personal interactions. I Googled myself and was shocked, sometimes pleasantly amazed, to see every comment indexed by the search engines. Who knows how deep it goes..
[...] we’re going to go the Facebook Connect route – we’re pretty excited about the one-click login for users as well. Now however, we’re posed with a different problem. We want to outsource [...]