An audience of two

Saturday September 29, 2007

1.0 in a Web2.0 world
Frankly I haven't bothered much with the phenomenon that is Social Networking. I do have a LinkedIn account (as does practically everyone else at Sun thanks to the numerous RIFs we've had) and I'm on Friends Reunited, though I haven't been on there in ages.

While preparing for CEC I saw that there are already various CEC2007 related entities. Obviously there are the CEC technorati tags, which I'm still not sure I'm using correctly - my last post showed up twice, but not with the URL I expected.

The main one seems to be on Facebook. There are about 230 members; exactly the same number as there are in the Solaris group. Coincidence? I signed up for Facebook and went around adding friends and poking people. The integration with mobile devices seems interesting, although I'm not sure how useful it is yet.

There's also a CEC group on Ning, but there doesn't seem to be anyone there. Which seems to be a generic problem with ning as far as I can see - shame, because apparently it's a Solaris house.

There's even a CEC 2007 group on flickr, which is currently empty (not entirely surprising). What was surprising to me was that I had a flickr account already; I didn't realise that I did.

And that's the big problem with all this Web 2.0 stuff, and with the web generally these day. I've got accounts on services that I've forgotten about. Every time I go to them I have to remember my user id - was it davetong, davidtong, david.tong@sun.com etc., or did I pick something else. What's the password - every site seems to have different restrictions. You must have a capital letter, a number, a punctuation mark, a Greek or Hebrew letter, a control sequence and some chord that can only be typed using four fingers on the left hand. Where's the single sign on that was promised so long ago but never materialised? I mean, I'm not talking about sites that hold financial or personal information, I'm talking about things like message boards where I go to discuss wine or TiVo or football. My sign in on sites like those is hardly legally binding, it's little more than one of those HELLO MY NAME IS stickers.

What the web still needs is a simple credential mechanism that you can automatically verify, like an RFID tag, so that sites automatically recognise you. It's not about privacy and security, it's about ease of use. You could make it a USB Dongle or Java chipped memory card, so that it's something physical that can't be faked, but then the point is that the sites it "protects" are so mundane that there would be no reason or benefit to compromising it (beyond the simple hacker reason of "it's there"). Worst case, hackers could then log in to the wine forums as me and post "I LIKE WHITE ZINFANDEL" everywhere.

Sure Microsoft had its Passport (and may still do for all I know) but few of us trusted Microsoft with something as important as an email address. And there's something called the Liberty Alliance who I believe are working on something like this, but as I understand it their focus is on banking and e-commerce, not twitter and pownce.

Frankly I'm surprised that Google haven't already come up with something. Those guys are slipping. Maybe once they have their moon base they'll work on it.

In the meantime, you can poke me on facebook or follow me on twitter while we wait if you like.

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Tags: facebook identity ning suncec2007 twitter