“The Emerging Age of Who” talk by Dick Hardt of SXIP

My notes from Dick Hardt’s talk kicked off the Future of Web Apps thing yesterday about identity… it was short talk, only 15 minutes, but it was dense.  I loved Dick’s presentation style of speaking without interruption while a stream of synchronized images flowed on the presentation in the background.  It’s something I’d love to try myself, I expect that doing it well takes a lot of practice.

Anyways, the notes:

Overview
————————–
What is identity?
Who are you?
Identity 2.0

parable: throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps out right away…
but if you slowly turn up the heat, it just sits there and slowly its dead

If we don’t have identity, it’s like groundhog day –> you start all over every day
credit history, etc –> past behaviour, predictor of future behaviour

digital identity
— lots of online identities, none of them are machine readability

Yahoo
— lots of experiences that are silo’ed, one identity system
— some aberrations like flickr which has an awkward dual login system

Microsoft
— .Net Passport –> name changed to MSN Live Login
— coming up is “Infocard” — this is “Identity 2.0”, it’s good

Google
— bunch of sites most of which are accessible through Google Accounts
— still the same silo thing that Yahoo and Microsoft have going on

eBay
— sepearate accounts — paypal, ebay,
— reputation — past behaviour –> future behaviour (ebay’s “viagra” around their application)
— anti-phishing — starting to do “multi-factor identification”, biometric ID

evolution of identity systems:

domain centric authentication (identity 1.0)
federation of identity systems — circle of trust — silos (identiy 1.5)
circle of trust that scales to the whole globe… need for identity 2.0

opportunities — single account (single point of failure?  no, that’s already there… really strong lock in one place)

Wikipedia–> using openID with reputation
slashdot–> “karma”– what if you could take it over to another site?
ebay–> users could present their ebay reputation to another site

infocard, openID are solutions for single account identity