Jeff On Games

I just finished watching this presentation from OSCON from the founder of Sxip on what he calls Identity 2.0. He also runs a blog by the same name.

I really liked this presentation, and I think he's moving in the right direction for creating an identity system for service / website authentication and online identity management (which, if you've been paying attention, has been a huge concern of mine recently). The one thing I'm not hearing is the ability to manage multiple versions of my identity. Dick talks about how he's a Canadian and he lives here and has x, y, and z. But what he doesn't talk about is how to handle having 3 email addresses, 4 sets of contacts, a business calendar, a personal calendar, and 3 shared calendars.

So, Sxip is an excellent step forward. Now I can verify who I am to any site. Now the question is how do I verify portions of myself? How do I tell the site to work with only a subset of my information without having to manually select small parts of it? How do I log into the same site 3 times without using different browsers (looking at you Google)?

These are not simple questions, and they don't have simple answers. I think online identity management is going to be the number one issue of the next 10 years, and I'll be surprised if it's solved even then.