Digital ID Coach

Discovering Friends

November 23rd, 2008

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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!

Yesterday morning on Twitter Gabe Wachob said,

Twould be nice if an app could log into Plaxo or Friendfeed, or whatever (using OAuth natch), and get an XRDS for a person (all their svcs)

I recognized this as geek language from the Internet Identity Workshop, which Gabe attended. I don’t know if this is exactly what Gabe meant, but it’s related. XRDS is short for eXtensible Resource Descriptor Sequence, which is a service discovery process.

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)

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