Own Your Web Identity

With the advent of web 2.0 and the wave of social networking sites, comes the notion of a “web identity”. Who are you on the net? I’m not talking about using an alias in a chat room. While aliases can be associations to a person, they are a small portion of what I’m referring to. Many of us have started to form a web identity, we have accounts on numerous social networking sites, spend time on blogs both writing and reading, we have multiple email accounts, and some of us play games.

Although we utilize all of these “tools” we have no mechanism to try everything together. There is not real tool that associates my Google Reader account with my World of Warcraft account or my Digg/del.icio.us/Stumblr/etc. accounts. Then, when I find a new site that seems to interest me, I have to create a new account adding, yet again, more separation and weakening the ties of my web identity. How do I verify that my post on Digg is the same as the one at Slashdot? What form of identification can I use to guarantee that? I can’t, yet. Enter The DataPortability Project. There is a great video up on this over at Vimeo describing the basics of what this project hopes to accomplish.
The Bene’s

The basic concept is one identity, one location for your data, and share. This means that when you join a new social networking site, you don’t have to add all of your friends and contacts again. You will have your videos, photos, mp3’s, contacts, etc. all available for you at the click of a mouse. No need to try and remember the hundreds of logins, you create one account and use _it_ to login.

This, in the future, can be used by game development companies to link game identities. This means that avatars, character names, user accounts, and those kinds of things can be used on any game. Imagine going from the XBox to World of Warcraft to whatever other games/consoles you have and being able to know that the person you knew in one game was the same person you knew in the other. It would be an awesome concept.
The Downside

Where I can envision something like this going is an identity that contains all of your personal information. That means that if you have a stock portfolio that you maintain online or banking information for automatic payments, you’d be able to manage it all from one single account. This is scary. When I think about the old adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” it makes me think of this. While the metaphor is referring to something slightly different, it can still be used here. You are betting that putting all of your personal information in a single location is best. Now, I’m sure it’s not going to require me to explain why this is a very plausible risk.

What about professional v.s. personal? There are some things that I’d rather not open up for the entire world to see, but definitely do not mind showing verified friends. How does that work with data portability? Are the controls that are generally built into something like Plaxo built into the data portability platform?
My Opinion

I think this is the next big thing in the web. To be honest, I think that there are some far more intelligent people working on this project and plan than myself and that my downsides have probably already been thought through. I also suspect that they have looked into the crystal ball and seen some of the potential uses of this technology. I think that so long as the correct security is in place, having one place for your data is the way to go. While I don’t see this really being a standard for a few years, I believe that once it does we will really see some significant changes in the way that people develop applications, both desktop and web based.
More Information

• The DataPortability Project
• Action Packs / White Papers
• Wikipedia: Data Portability