I will give a talk at the new O’Reilly “Emerging Telephony Conference” on January 26, 2006, at the San Francisco Airport Marriot. Here is the summary:

Indentity Crisis: Namespaces Out of Control – Johannes Ernst, Netmesh/Yadis.org

Date: Thursday, January 26th, 2006
Time: 11:30am – 11:45am
Location: Grand Ballroom A-F

In the old days, all we needed to know was a telephone number of the person we wanted to communicate with. Today, there are fixed and mobile phone numbers, email addresses, instant messaging handles, VoIP user names, account names at dozens of websites, blog URLs, and more. The list keeps growing as new methods of communication and collaboration are invented and innovation proceeds with no end in sight.

Radical simplification is needed not just because all these identifiers and the passwords that go with them can’t be remembered. It’s also needed because this fragmentation holds back new applications that take advantage of the new communications cornucopia: unified posting and messaging, user-centric remixing of a variety of data streams, multi-technology presence and communications, and many others.

Recently, a number of bottom-up projects (such as LID, OpenID, SXIP, i-names) have sprung up to provide unified identification and authentication across a range of IP-based services. Internet-wide identity interoperability, enabled by the YADIS project, is becoming a real possibility and will turbo-charge the development of a range of compelling new applications. In this talk, Ernst provides a brief overview over these projects, explains how to take advantage of interoperable digital identities, and discusses a couple of innovative applications.

Why at a telephony conference? Simple: it’s not just about web single-sign on. It’s about allowing people to be first-class entities on the network, and that also means I shoulnd’t have a phone number from Cingular and one from SBC and a Skype handle and an AIM handle, but I should be able to give you a single identifier — a REST-ful LID or YADIS URL that I pick — which is sufficient to allow you to contact me through any of those technologies, tag me, point to me, and so many other things that open up a myriad of possibilities … not the least of which is to drive more business to those systems because using them becomes simpler, again.