As a continuation of my last post about my fragmented online identity, I have an idea about how to fix it. Here is my wish list of requirements for my online identity:
- It should be available 24×7, 365 days a year.
- It should contain all the information that I think is relevant to my online identity. This includes everything that I listed in the previous post.
- I should be able to use it establish relationships with others.
- I should be able to share it with others.
- Anyone who knows me should be able to find me.
- I don’t want a specific software company or group of people (the government) to be able to control it, hide it, disable it, change it, or make it obsolete.
- I want to be able to use it to log in to sites and services.
- I want to be able to use it wherever I am, regardless of which device I’m using.
- Where I store it should either be "Everywhere", or I should be able to transfer it to a new location transparently and easily.
- I should be able to keep some information from some people and share it with others.
None of the current ideas floating around out there really meet all these requirements, as far as my small brain is able to understand. However, this sounds an awful lot like a Web site to me. Let’s go through how a Web site might meet these requirements:
- It should be available 24×7, 365 days a year: Hosted sites typically have 99.9% uptime these days. However, someone who didn’t care about this is free to host a public site from their desktop PC.
- It should contain all the information that I think is relevant to my online identity. This includes everything that I listed in the previous post: This pretty much describes my MySpace page. There’s not much there except for links to other sites/profiles of mine.
- I should be able to use it to establish relationships with others: This is just a structured BlogRoll or OPML file.
- I should be able to share it with others: Web sites typically work that way. I tell somebody to look at my Web site at www.jasonkolb.com and that’s all they need to know.
- Anyone who knows me should be able to find me: Search engines accomplish this, although I think there’ll need to be changes made in this area eventually. MySpace, by the way, is truly the pits at enabling this.
- I don’t want a specific software company or group of people (the government) to be able to control it, hide it, disable it, change it, or make it obsolete: This just rules out sites like MySpace and LinkedIn.
- I want to be able to use it to log into sites and services: OK, this is a wish list item, but I can see a pretty simple way to make it work: store your personal certificate/InfoCard/whatever on your site, and protect it with a password.
- I want to be able to use it wherever I am, regardless of which device I’m using: Thankfully the Internet does that for me.
- Where I store it should either be "Everywhere", or I should be able to transfer it to a new location transparently and easily: This is as simple as switching Web hosts and copying the contents of my Web site to the new host.
- I should be able to keep some information from some people and share it with others: Ahh, here’s the hard part. We could do this today with a firewall, but that’s not exactly easy. However, M. David Peterson has come up with a nice elegant solution to this: come up with a URL request/key combination that you can use to identify and authorize somebody to see your information. This would require software that’s not written yet, but it would just generate an email to somebody telling them to go to a specific URL to see your profile. If you want to cut them off, you disable the key. Simple.
I think we’re approaching the point in time when we can expect everyone to have some kind Web presence. MySpace has helped make that concept more palatable to the generic public.
Unfortunately, I can’t quite do this yet because I want to host my blog at www.jasonkolb.com, and TypePad doesn’t support this yet. Otherwise, I’d be doing it right now.
