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’ve been fascinated by Radioheads selling of In Rainbows on the internet. People have been heralding it as the end of record labels etc etc.
