The identity

[Emmanuel Pire]

An idea just crossed my mind. might not be what we're looking for but i thought i'd post it anyway, to keep juices flowing.

I can't figure out a good way to have an identity without a network (like facebook) and having an account on that network.

We thought this network, hub, could be sharebro.org

I think we can't do this without some kind of central point, but i'd like to keep it a small actor. as small as possible.

So, who keeps my identity and all connexions from and to it ? (following, followers)

what if the feed itself is the identity ?

a feed right now is xml that contains items. our shared items.

what if it also contains some standardized public ID that says it's me, Emmanuel Pire.

and followers too, i'm Emmanuel these are my friends.

and the ones I follow.

In a spirit of feed discovering, it would be great. and best for me: no organisation is storing this info. it's stored in the source feed.

if i want to move my feed, i move everything with it.

It's a very wild idea, it needs security and privacy options, but i'd love to hear your opinion on this.

--
Emmanuel Pire
Web development
http://lipsumarium.com/

[Emmanuel Pire]

From Alex K.

> In terms of identity, and social graph there are some standards already. You should take a look at webfinger for identity, and FOAF for connection lists.

I took a look at both, they have very good ideas. What do you think should be the identity: email like webfinger suggest or openID style with browser login ?

Browser login is just sweet and is around since longer than i thought. This fulfill my needs of not being tied to a service, even only for the login.

Webfinger got me at "an email fits better as an identifier used by humans than url".

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these services.

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Alex Chaffee <al...@stinky.com> wrote:

too much here but I think you're thinking about Open ID

also related federated identity management proposals

gotta go drink wine and eat burger now

cheers

> --
> The Sharebro Google Group: for http://sharebro.org and related development
> http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options
>

--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

[Alex Chaffee]

> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Alex Chaffee <al...@stinky.com> wrote:
>>
>> too much here but I think you're thinking about Open ID
>>
>> also related federated identity management proposals
>>
>> gotta go drink wine and eat burger now
>>
>> cheers

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Emmanuel Pire <pirem...@gmail.com>
wrote:> From Alex K.>> In terms of identity, and social graph there

are some standards already.>> You should take a look at webfinger for
identity, and FOAF for connection>> lists.> I took a look at both,
they have very good ideas. What do you think should> be the identity:
email like webfinger suggest or openID style with browser> login ?>

> I'd love to hear your thoughts on these services.

My thoughts are, this is a complicated issue and different
applications have different needs and therefore different solutions.

OpenID was designed as an attempt to solve this "federated/distributed
identity" problem and I think it was only partly successful. There are
a few design flaws (what if your chosen OpenID provider dies?) and a
few UX flaws (the original OpenID forced your id to be a huge long URL
string; these have been mostly fixed in recent years, but in different
ways by different providers).

The state of the art now is that most webapps maintain their own
concept of *identity* but may use common means for *authentication*.
E.g. even when you "sign in with facebook" (or google or twitter or
openid or whatever) on a webapp like GetSatisfaction
[http://getsatisfaction.com/login], that webapp still maintains its
own profile and account info for you. And if you link your accounts
then you can *authenticate* with any of your providers but still be
known as the same *identity* once you're in. I think that state of the
art is good enough for me for the time being.

I have big conceptual problems with email = identity. Emails are often
not under a user's control (e.g. j...@comcast.net). Also the same human
usually has many email addresses -- and it's never as simple as "one
for work and one for personal use". Furthermore, lots of people don't
use email regularly; they use Facebook and Twitter and SMS all the
time tho.

[Emmanuel Pire]

Thanks for the openID landscape.

Split authentication and identity seems the way to go. Google/Facebook/whatever login has 1 click login and it's indeed less strange to nowadays users than browser authentication. I'm in favor of this kind of way to login.

Now about identity, the main problem i see is that yes, what if the place i chose to store my content in dies ?

But with linked profiles, i guess services will back them up so we could not restart from scratch at another provider ? 

Never heard of linked profiles btw, is that an openID feature ?

I have big conceptual problems with email = identity. Emails are often
not under a user's control (e.g. j...@comcast.net). Also the same human
usually has many email addresses -- and it's never as simple as "one
for work and one for personal use". Furthermore, lots of people don't
use email regularly; they use Facebook and Twitter and SMS all the
time tho.

I agree.

[Saliency]

Not sure you need identity if you are posting your shares to a rss feed.  (tumblr, blogger, ect)  The rss feed URL is your identity.

[Emmanuel Pire]

I was thinking about a unified identity across all services, but now I don't think it's a good idea..

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Saliency <sali...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not sure you need identity if you are posting your shares to a rss feed.  (tumblr, blogger, ect)  The rss feed URL is your identity.

--

The Sharebro Google Group: for http://sharebro.org and related development
http://groups.google.com/group/sharebro for archives and options

[Les Orchard]

On 11/17/11 3:18 PM, Emmanuel Pire wrote:
> I was thinking about a unified identity across all services, but now I
> don't think it's a good idea..

If you haven't seen it before, WebFinger might be relevant:

http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

Basically lets you use something that looks like an email address (eg.
m...@lmorchard.com) as an identity.

The webfinger scheme lets hosts (e.g. lmorchard.com) specify mapping
rules from names (eg. "me") to URLs. And, so, services can discover
identity details like this:

http://webfinger.org/lookup/m...@lmorchard.com

--
m...@lmorchard.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist