more thoughts on digital global identity
I’ve been interested in digital identity but have not engaged the topic too much. Truth is, as much as I like openID, I never felt that it would quickly have mainstream adoption. It has been implemented by many giants who in turn are able to offer the openID authentication option to it’s users. But in most cases, that’s where the adoption began and stopped. So if my mom is confronted with “login with openID?” it means nothing to her. People like this will just use multiple accounts with the same username and password. Not good but it’s the poor man’s openID… or rather the lazy man’s openID.
It’s also the concept of openID that is a hurdle. Even if it is much simpler to signup and use. Lastly, it’s the issue of getting people to want openID (or other forms of a unified global identity).
The trend with most cloud services is to use your email address as your username. This is a good trend and saves people from having to remember half of their credentials across different websites. Your email address is your unique ID. No conflicts. No usernames that need to be “joesmith68″ on one service and “joesmith1968″ on another etc. Most people rely on one email address and that is often via google, yahoo, microsoft and few other players. Anti-spam has been greatly improved over the past decade. So, a natural solution is to make your email address your global identity. The problem is, you cannot attach metadata to your email address so all you are sharing is the email address, not any other associated contact, personal or business information. But now Google plans to support a new effort that brings back the concept of an old Internet protocol called “Finger” in the form of Webfinger. The proposed protocol would require a consortium of supporters and implementers. It would have gone nowhere fast if Google did not announce that it was supporting the project. The google engineers that head the project are also involved in the pubsubhubbub protocol.
The importance of email is being re-realized by the giants. It’s not that they forgot. How can you? Everyone uses email. It is the glue, it is the pulse. It is the fallback distributed protocol that we all depend on. It is not perfect but nothing is. It is not as vulnerable to being destroyed by spam now that advances have been made and deployed to block and filter out spam from either reaching your account or at least from reaching your “inbox”. Myspace has recently put a lot of focus on their vanity email service. Facebook is also working on big improvements to offer its millions of users better email functionality. Likewise, publishing content via email is on the rise as it is easy and accessible from mobile devices like your phones. Email is pervasive.
I know that I am fairly late into the discussion of the telnic .tel tld service. But better late than never.
Last night, I listened to a podcast that was nearly a year old and read a thorough blog post from last december. Together, it was a great summary of what telnic is and the concerns that have been brought up in response to the company’s public launch earlier year. It’s looking like your global identifier will come down to using a domain such as .tel and DNS records or using an email address in conjunction with the Webfinger protocol (also involving the use of DNS and XRD). I’ve written about webfinger and telnic earlier this week (http://vocal.ly/21) so i don’t want to reiterate. But excuse me as i also use this blog as an output for processing thoughts and coming to loose dynamic conclusions 
Putting aside for a moment which is a better choice, a domain or an email address… What if it does not matter and both are used? Undoubtedly feasible. No reason that more than one global identity cannot exist. The services and software that handle your global ID just need to decipher whether the ID is type domain or type email. A user can link to their email address from a .tel (or any domains DNS) and can link to their .tel from their email records (using webfinger). It might make sense for telnic to provide a suggested use for specifying your supplemental “email identity” and vise versa. It may also be logical to specify which ID you consider to be your primary and secondary ID so services can logically prioritize and weight their lookups.
I’m concluding that services need to offer Digital Global Identity Packages that provide users with choices.
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