One of the overview ideas about OpenID is that it gives you a place that you can call your own. It’s a URL (a web address) that gives information about you to other sites that you decide to share that information with. For instance, you can use your OpenID to sign in and make comments on this and certain other blogs, to sign into other services, and to represent yourself (and if you choose to make it public, what you’re doing).
The idea behind distributed social networking is that, like Facebook and MySpace and other social networking sites, you should be able to connect with your friends; but unlike those sites, you aren’t required to create an account on each one of your friends’ other services.
Here’s a great 15 min. video from pixelsebi that explains it.
Coaching moment: In the past, and still to a large extent, web sites want to “own” us and our data. But think about this: their data is merely a point in time, and unless we choose to update that service, their data about us often gets stale and goes out of date. What if we controlled what companies knew about us? There is certain data that might be required for requested transactions, but what might you want the world to know about you?
Several days ago my friend Michael and I were talking about services like LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook, and every new site that pops up. The problem is, as it has been for a long time, that these services are proprietary information silos: once you have an account with them, you (your id and persona: your behavior, data, applications, and connections to your friends) belong to that service, and that service doesn’t interact with other services.
Our conversation was more about wondering what if we could have our OWN site of certain things we want the world to know about us (this is not only possible but wide-spread–blogs are a good example). As part of that site, we have a service in which we identify our friends (public or not) and enable some feature that says, “if my friend Michael turns up on ANY service, connect to him,” and “if my friend Sara is found on a service I’ve identified as professional (say, LinkedIn or work related), connect to her.”
With a service like this, we wouldn’t have to find all of our friends each time we signed on to a new thing, then send the friend an email saying “will you connect with me again?” This gets tiring. Instead we might have a single page on our service that gives us the option of updating and accepting an ongoing conversation of discovery with our friends. Much easier and WAY more empowering!
I’ll admit that I don’t yet understand how all of the various layers of identity management work. I do understand that the idea of “service discovery” is that it let your tools do the finding and connecting for you. Now it’s just a matter of how and when.
Coaching moment: Tools are being developed that will let us be explicit about our relationships with our family, friends and colleagues.
This can make life tricky. Who would you want to tell they aren’t really part of your tribe right now? It’s a little like disinheriting family members before you’re dead. Or reality checks for your “friends,” and for you! A bit jarring? It should be.
But the alternative is what I described above (information silo). Wouldn’t YOU rather be in control than the many services who don’t talk to each other? I would.
UPDATE: Visionary guy Kevin Kelly touches on this topic about 14 min 30 secs into this video (where it gets interesting). He points out that we will have to be open to sharing this data about ourselves with others. “Total personalization will require total transparency.” (Nov. 24, 2008)
There are a lot of ways that we identify ourselves, as explained on the Identities page. One way that we define ourselves is by our groups. That is, we are a member of a group, and the group has its own identity (reputation, mission, purpose, common interest, etc.). We call our groups by various names: our team, our tribe, our peeps, our friends, our colleagues, our congregation, our neighbors…
One example of group membership is when people identify themselves as part of a neighborhood and it’s broad reputation. For example, Berkeley California is noted (by Wikipedia) as “one of the most politically liberal in the nation, with one study placing it as the third most liberal city in the United States.[1]“ Here is a 98-slide parade in Berkeley (thanks ChristopherA) of people that identify with their city, its reputation, their neighbors, et al.
A common identity may emerge from a group of people with a like interest. Here’s a picture of the early Greenpeace organizers, who identified themselves as part of a movement that was (is) needed to protect the earth.
I love this picture of a funeral procession (thanks JKwest, whom I don’t know). The picture speaks of people that identify themselves as knowing and wishing to pay respects to a particular person. We are members of groups in life as well as in death.
Coaching moment: You are part of a group because it gives you strength and as a collective voice. Can you think of one example in your life? Write down a few thoughts on what it means to be a member of that group. Put your thoughts away for a month or two. Pull it out and review it to see if the group is still serving its purpose for you.
You may also be a member of a group that you would not wish to be a part of. What is it about this group that you do not identify with, or that doesn’t feel like it’s a part of you?
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