Disclaimer: Before I get a nastygram from Cisco HR or legal, the title of this post does NOT refer to Cisco in any way but rather the Internet/technology community in general. I just think the term "human network" is a really great way to describe what the industry is stumbling towards.
I know “the human network” is Cisco’s slogan, and there’s a lot of cynicism around it being marketing fluff. However, I think that they actually have the right idea in making that the ideal (it was a brilliant slogan in my mind), because there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the direction things are headed.
The latest evidence that this is happening is the recent, awkward choice of Yahoo and Google to market their email services as social networks. (And, what’s with the "Inbox 2.0"? This versioning everything is getting REALLY old at this point. Personally I thought "next generation" worked perfectly well as a descriptive term.) This is pretty obviously a desperate attempt to grasp at some social networking market share—not by competing toe-to-toe against the leaders on a level playing field, but by changing the name of the playing field. While I think it’s ill-conceived and probably won’t do anything but add some features to their email platforms, they have hit on an interesting theme that I happen to have a particularly strong interest in. And that theme is online identity convergence, aka the march towards a true Human Network.
Back when I started my weblog, my very first posts centered the idea of taking email and making it your online identity, for single-sign on and personal identification. Turns out that it doesn’t work very well in practice, but making your email address a central component of your online identity is, in fact, very important—even in what we think of as a typical social network like MySpace or FaceBook. In fact, most social networks use their users’ email addresses as the ultimate key/validator/identifier for their individual users at the end of the day. If you have to reset your password, you use your email address. If someone wants to find you on the site, they usually have to use your email address.
The point is that, by process of trial and error, the industry is slowly figuring out that each user is ultimately identified by a node on the network, whether that is an email address or a Web address. I’m still convinced that everyone will be identified by a URI eventually (I went into a lot of detail on that in the past, if you’re not familiar with URI’s you probably should be), using email addresses as personal identifier is a step in that direction.
When URI’s are used to identify individuals you get the ability to layer on all kinds of communications around that URI. That includes email, Web, voice, instant messaging, presence, and all sorts of stuff. XMPP is a great example of the capabilities that you can gain by identifying people using a URI. The big bump in the road is that in order for this to truly work, I believe that service providers are going to have to give up ownership of their users’ identities. That’s a tough pill to swallow for them, as it completely eliminates any sort of vendor lock-in. But it’s where things will inevitably end up sooner or later, and it’s interesting to see the contortions the industry is going thru on the way there.
