On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog
Peter Steiner’s cartoon of a dog using the internet was published by the New Yorker in 1993. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, runs the caption.
My online presence is manifested in this blog, in Facebook, and in various other profiles I’ve created online – not always obviously connected to me. I don’t necessarily want all my profiles connected to me (especially not my Livejournal from ’00).
Above all, it’s clear that my presence is disparate, uncontrolled, and rather schizophrenic in nature. I’ve lost track of the online services I’ve signed up for, the profiles I’ve created (from Geocities to Neopets) since I first started to sign up for stuff. Each of these services had their own mail system, their own network.
Jeff Jarvis proclaims that the internet is the social network:
The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.
How do we find people? Without network enablers, people online are without presence. A network enabler does three things. It gives people a presence, and organises these presences, and gives people a clear way to find other people. Without this, people online are the sum of all their data debris, their purchases on eBay, their Amazon wishlist. A profile gathers this information together.
The open web – I think of a vast, expanding, mostly uncivilised terrain – means we rely on network enablers to make the ground habitable for us. We rely on technology provided by Facebook, by Google, for example, to organise presence.
The trouble is that by putting my presence in the hands of Google, I am giving them my trust. Do I really want to depend on one company for all my online services? My dependence on Google, at the moment, is not too bad; it spans my personal email and my feeds. I also use Google for maps and search, which doesn’t require me to be logged in. Even though my Google dependence is not very strong, I would hate to lose my account with Google.
OpenID is a possible answer here. I like their brief summary: An open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil [nice choice of word] or goes out of business”.
FOAF looks interesting too. Otherwise, I think online identity is still problematic. Maybe it’s the dichotomy of online/offline: unless we turn people into their devices, there’ll always be a space between the person, the machine they use, and what they use the machine for.
Turning people into their machines is an extreme solution. Perhaps what we need, my friend has just suggested, is a “distributed identity, across many sites, with an independent means of controlling which sites have access to data from other sites … a really advanced keychain”.
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A couple of things you might want to read on this subject…
http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2008/02/the_social_graph_api_and_surprises.html
What Chris talks about will come, but it may take longer than we want.
Brad Fitz’s ideas are pretty much exactly what I was thinking of. I even had the idea that you could create a unique identifier for someone by hashing a piece of info about them. The part I don’t understand is how to work out where to find information about a user in a distributed system. What’s needed is a sort of DNS for people.
What’s needed is a sort of DNS for people.
Like that!
Have you heard of XFN (http://gmpg.org/xfn/) — cross-linking of people at its most simplistic.
The problem is the organisations who hold presence have all done their own thing. This is same with usernames and passwords, which openid is slowly starting to solve. What has given openid traction is that for organisations it is very easy to set-up. My openid, for example, is my iChat username. AOL have turned all AIM usernames into openids. Really simple, no hassle for me.
If a standard is developed where organisations can convert their bespoke presence into a global standard one, without too much work, then it might happen.
But what of those who decide at some point they no longer want to be thoroughly connected?
How would such people extricate themselves from a system of identification whose parts are beyond their control — or whose parts are so numerous as to make re-acquiring anonymity difficult to impossible?