Blogging is a funny thing. One never knows which posts gets picked up by others and which doesn’t; and which is discussed publicly and which only one-on-one on the back channel.
My recent piece The Identity Landscape of 2006 is one of those cases where there has been little public discussion and a lot of back channel discussion. Let me try to summarize what I heard because it may be of interest:
- Nobody — to me, at least — has made the point that I’m wrong about what I called "the three pillars". That’s good, because that’s why I decided to pen this piece in the first place. Some question whether the term “pillar” is right or whether we should rather talk about a continuum. I’d argue that there are few, if any, products/projects connecting those three things yet, so I think is discrete metaphor, like “pillar” is probably appropriate at this stage. Once large-scale interoperability occurs — anybody’s guess when at this time — I will of course change that term.
- Nobody disagreed that there are good reasons for why those pillars exist. Some question whether the light-weight approaches, growing up from things like blogs, are “true” identities; I’d say that what is and isn’t a “true” identity is in the eye of the beholder, and I don’t think anybody would argue that they can’t grow, which they do anyway on an almost weekly basis in some places.
- Nobody disagreed that identity simply must become interoperable to have value, and that sooner or later, these three “pillars” will have to be bridged.
That’s all great. But I also got push-back on two of my particular choices of terms:
- "user-controlled": it apparently came across to some that way, but I did not mean to imply at all that what Kim and Microsoft have been working on does not give a lot of control to the user, because it does. (Note: somebody should list those new levers of control one day, that would be very worthwhile doing.) I just happen to think that the URL-based approaches give more control to the user, and that’s why that pillar is labeled "user-controlled" and the others are not. I guess I will have to expand on that when I get around to it.
- "Microsoft-controlled": that was easy to predict, as I did, but I probably did not make my case well enough.