|
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Previous topic
|
Next topic
|
|
 Saturday, September 24, 2005
started 9/24/2005; 3:26:52 PM - last post 9/24/2005; 10:42:51 PM
|
|
Doc Searls - Saturday, September 24, 2005 
9/24/2005; 7:26:52 PM (reads: 7003, responses: 1)
|
|
Whydentity 
| | Mary Hodder: Flickr and Yahoo and Identity Management. The arguments here have mostly blown over (read the comments to see what they were). But I gotta say that getting friends to sign up at Flickr (to see photos visible only to friends and family) makes some of them go grrr. |
| | I just registered a new identity there (Yahoo, via Flickr). It's the usual PITA, though not a huge one. The real problem is, it puts you into Yahoo's silo, with your own Yahoo mail address, after asking you to declare your occupation and so on — so "content" from Yahoo can be made appropriate to you, presumably. |
| | Standard Operating Procedure, basically. Big companies like Yahoo that offer lots of services really have no choice about putting users through this kind of gauntlet. The real problem is the absense of something we've needed all along: Independent Identity, owned by the individual, rather than granted by outside commercial and governmental bodies. With Independent Identity, sovereign individuals could selectively present credentials and do business, anywhere on the Net (or in the physical world, for that matter), without being forced to obtain "membership" or whatever. Their private information (memberships, preferences, transaction histories, attention data) would reside with the equivalent of a bank or a broker, and would be represented to others in a way that revealed only what the transaction, conversation or relationship required. |
| | 1. In a truly free marketplace, vendors in a category compete openly for a customer's business, based on information the customer supplies at his or her discretion to any or all of them. Customer data isn't isolated in vendor silos, and customers aren't forced to go from one silo to another and interact separately with each vendor's customer relationship management system, its lame marketing agendas and its locked-up data. |
| | 2. Customers won't have full power in any marketplace unless they control their own data, including data about their relationships with vendors, and selectively make private data available to vendors, with explicit permissions regarding each vendor's use of it. Drummond Reed of Cordance and Identity Commons calls this CoRM, or company relationship management. |
| | 3. Personal identity control and CoRM are powers customers have not experienced since the Industrial Age began and they first became "consumers". As fully empowered customers, they will blow the CRM blinders off vendors, release a wave of entrepreneurship, differentiation and innovation and make markets grow in all directions. This won't be a market revolution but, rather, the dawn of a real market-where demand and supply have equal power. |
| | 4. CoRM requires identity services that do not yet exist. Those services also serve other purposes-SSO, or single sign-on, authentication, security, privacy and so on. But whatever those services may be, they share a point of origin: the individual. This invites adjectives such as grass-roots, lightweight, user-centric, next-generation, human origin, bottom-up and distributed. I like the literal meaning of the word independent. Every speech I make on this subject is a literal declaration of customer independence. |
| | 5. Independent Identity is a human quality more than an organizational one. Establishing and ubiquitizing Independent Identity therefore needs to be a grass-roots movement that grows on open standards and with support from the Open Source community. For that reason, it only makes sense for Independent Identity to grow from the bottom up rather than from the top down, from individuals rather than from organizations. |
| | ...then focuses mostly on the remarkable work being done by Kim Cameron at Microsoft, and many others, to bring vendor-Independent Identity to the marketplace. |
| | I'm going to some meetings at Stanford next week to talk about this stuff. Among technology subjects, I don't know anything that's more important in the long run. (Or, perhaps, more boring in the short, at least when conversation gets mired in the usual arguments about privacy and crypto and The Big Evil Corporations or whatever. Which I hope we can avoid.) |
| | Anyway, read it and see whatchata think. |
Loose links
| | Mike Sanders: If anybody at Time Warner is reading this (and I hope that you're not), please don't every consider starting a blog, just keep on focusing on giving me better services at better prices. |
| | Scott Anderson: If the NYT's columnists and their "distinctive voices" fall over in the TimesSelect forest and nobody hears them, do they make a noise? |
| | Barb Dybwad: How do you do it? What¹s your system of conversation tracking? Are there tools out there that I don¹t know about designed to facilitate conversation tracking? Are there folks working on some? |
discuss
|
|
Andrew Leyden - Re: Saturday, September 24, 2005
9/25/2005; 2:42:51 AM (reads: 563, responses: 0)
|
|
|
I actually have a secondary identity of a 72 old female firefighter living in Honolulu that I use for things like this. Well, it says I'm a female firefighter on all their sign ups.
discuss
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
