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Nick Givotovsky, a Connecticut based internet consultant and long time contributor to the digital identity community, died in an accident at his home on Friday at the age of 44. Givotovsky was an active member of the Data Portability Working Group, was a regular attendee of the Internet Identity Workshops and was Steward for the Identity Futures group in Identity Commons. He is recognized by both communities as a valued, respected and well liked contributor to many important efforts.

Author and consultant Doc Searls writes in a post memorializing Givotovsky that "Every encounter with Nick was engaging and mind-sharpening." London entrepreneur, Ian Henderson, offers the following quote from Givotovsky, exemplifying his contribution to the digital rights conversation.

Last Friday was a hot day in Sebastopol, California. Eran Hammer-Lahav rolled into town hours after finding out that there was a security hole in his pet project for the last few months, a new way to use Twitter to log in to third party sites using the OAuth protocol instead of user names and passwords. Working as the Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo, Hammer-Lahav was relieved to have been told about the hole so he could help fix it. When he arrived in Sebastopol at a small event of industry leaders called Social Web FOO Camp, he talked with friends and colleagues about it.

At some point in conversation Hammer-Lahav realized that the problem went far beyond the Twitter implementation. The OAuth protocol had an inherent vulnerability; big companies like Google, Netflix and Yahoo had implemented OAuth and scores of tiny startups had too.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

You can log in to comment here on ReadWriteWeb with an OpenID, via Facebook Connect or through various other methods. Imagine if you could make "friend" connections with other commenters on our site. That relationship wouldn't be reflected back into the OpenID or Facebook account that you then take to other sites.

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We'd love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That's what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it's the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

These days it's all about making your free web site "go viral" right? Maybe that was the all-too-common business plan in recent years - but many people were uncomfortable with that vision at a time of relative economic well-being. You can imagine how crazy such a plan sounds now.

Well-known PR pro Jeremy Toeman has started a business you'd hardly recognize as part of an era of YouTube clones, yet it is dependent on that very world of free, prolific, user generated content. Legacy Locker is a new service that stores your passwords to important services like email and social networks and delivers them to a caretaker in the event of your death. The company charges money and has a real-world market channel primed to resell its services. It's something we think many web entrepreneurs could find inspiration in.

Two days into the new Presidential administration, Barack Obama issued a memo calling on the still unfilled new office of Chief Technology Officer to make a list of recommendations for an Open Government Directive. The recommendations are due within 120 days of that memo, which called for "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." What would you like to see on the list of recommendations?

This morning the highly effective nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation launched a new microsite called Our Open Government List, where anyone can make suggestions for government transparency and all of us can vote on our favorite ideas. It's like Digg for steps to open up public data.

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.