As long as people are willing to trust their Twitter log-in information to third parties - and don't look carefully at URLs before they log into websites - and as long as a small number of bad actors want to pee in the social media swimming pool, this kind of thing will continue happening.

Apparently there's no substitute for ruthlessly and constantly policing your own feed, thoroughly investigating services before you sign up for them, double-checking the URL every time you are about to enter info into a form, and regularly purging your OAuth settings of services you no longer use.

Also, to be safe, change your password regularly... you don't have to be obsessive about it: every three hours or so should be enough. And because erring on the side of caution is always a good idea, fake your own suicide and change your identity at least once a year.

And you thought Twitter was going to be fun? Slacker.

More Noise to Signal.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement.

Participating companies include Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and "related agencies."

Conversation about whether and how best to implement a system of Federated Identity across government websites has been underway for at least the last 6 months. We wrote about the first public rumblings this summer. Kaliya Hamlin explains the state of the conversation in detail on her blog.

The two biggest questions will be protection of privacy and user experience.

Privacy Protections

OpenID board member and Facebook employee David Recordon explained to us tonight that participating government sites are not allowed to pass personal information about users from one site to another, even though we'll be logging in with the same accounts. Instead, when we authenticate ourselves with Google, Yahoo, Verisign or whoever our Identity Provider of choice is, that website will pass a different, unique URL to the government site we're logging in to.

The identity providers will keep track of all the unique URLs used to identify us to different government sites and we'll just need to remember one log-in. That means you'll need to trust your identity provider to keep your private information separated between agencies - it won't be up to the government sites themselves to do so.

User Experience

User experience has been one of the biggest issues around systems of federated identity since they began to proliferate. No decisions have been made yet about exactly how users will log in to these government sites, but we will be given a limited number of choices between providers that have been government approved. (If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that.)

Most likely users will be presented with an array of logos to click on, launching a new window to communicate just with the identity provider. Once a user proves who they are to the identity provider, that company will then vouch for the user to the government site.

Why Is This Important?

This is a significant move for three reasons. First, it could make securely accessing government websites much easier for users. That would increase use of government services online and could kick off a virtuous circle of increased web-savvy service in response to increased citizen interest.

Second, federated identity provides not just easy "single sign-on" but also offers the opportunity for users to carry personal information with them from one website to another. This "payload" of information can help new websites we use quickly personalize our experience and deliver more intelligent service. That's likely to be complicated when it comes to privacy-centric areas like health, but there's a lot of potential there. If Google knows you've made plans to travel to another country soon, and if you're willing to expose that information to a government website, then the site could offer health-specific information about the country you plan on visiting for example. That's a long ways off, but it's part of the big vision of data portability.

Finally, when any large institution puts its weight behind an open standard then that creates more incentive for other institutions to get on board with the standard as well. Federated Identity systems like OpenID and Info Cards have seen growing amounts of support from different companies, but as that support grows then the information available to innovate on top of grows, the number of opportunities for users to access innovative services built on top of standards grows and the incentive for still more companies to get on board with open data, innovative technology and data portability grows as well.

To draw the standard railroad analogy, if one large railroad network adopts the new standard of rail sizes then trains that run on standard rails can travel further, the passengers can go new places and other networks have more interest in adopting the standard as well. On the information super-highway, the network of government websites are a very big railroad (if you will).

The pilot program will remain a discussion for some time. The OpenID and Information Card Foundations are good places to visit if you'd like to participate in the conversations that will inform later implementation.

This commitment to identity integration, coupled with Chrome's move to cloud-based bookmarking, point to the growth of the borderless social web experience - an experience that has been a long time coming. For years we've asked for social network portability and the freedom to manage our own online relationships. With this rising trend towards browser-based service integration and cloud-based data storage, we're one step closer to realizing that dream.

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.

There are indeed technologists fully qualified to architect the infrastructure to enable a better, more equitable, reciprocal, transparent and accountable digital realm, and they have to a large extent already built the tools and system. Now, the application of that prospective infrastructure to systems and services with the potential to change "the digital deal" from the user-centric perspective is what's needed, and I hope, what's next.

Going forward, the formulation, creation and assertion of binding identity rights agreements in the context of "leverage", that in turn drives change enabled in the market by market forces, is the most pragmatic, short path to something better than a-shrug-a-click-and-a-sigh privacy statements.

It's exactly the implementation of such use cases to which I think the most beneficial and productive (though not always the most immediately profitable) effort can, and should be devoted. We all need a better, fairer, more accountable and credible digital deal. If we are to be "digital citizens" should we not also know the real "digital deal"?

Givotovsky leaves behind a wife and two children.

Not everyone is excited about the move, however; a number of critics are taking advantage of the opportunity to raise concerns about digital identity and user freedom online.

Messina cites three other thinkers in his critique:

• Vanity URLs as anonymity. Messina: "If Dustin Moskovitz were dead, he'd be rolling over in his grave. For those of you who don't know who Dustin Moskovitz is, he's one of those infrequently mentioned co-founders of Facebook that prevented Facebook from offering usernames or friendly web addresses (so-called "vanity URLs" in the industry) from the beginning. It was his insistence that people should go by their real names on Facebook -- and should thus perform under their true identities -- that I posit has accounted for much of Facebook's success with non-digital natives."


• Vanity URLs as too much power for the vendor. Brian Oberkirch, after SXSW this year: "At one of the SXSW panels a few weeks ago, I saw something that caught my eye. I think Micah may have started it, but one by one all the panelists took their name placards, wrote their Twitter handles on the back, then flipped them around so you were looking at a row of people announcing themselves by @handles....Think of the power of this for Twitter. You don't need to name the animals. You only need to be the language in which animals speak [about] themselves. For Unlimited Power (mmmwhahahahhaha)"


• Vanity URLs as lock-in for users. Messina: "[This is something] Tim O'Reilly warned about in his definition of Web 2.0. He said that one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace. There you have it -- who are you going to trust to own yours?"

Think about how often many people now identify themselves as "@twitterusername" - is that not a little creepy? The more we build our identities, social connections and personal histories around a single communication platform that we don't control - the less free we become to take our ball and go home if the need arises in the future.

What if Twitter does something more egregious than its recent muffling of conversation via @ replies? What if Facebook does something you find incredibly offensive regarding matters like Holocaust denial. What if a better service simply comes along? What are you going to do - leave Facebook?

That will be hard enough given that all your messages, your media and your friend connections are trapped there. Why make it harder on yourself to act freely by introducing yourself as Facebook.com/ImAgOober to everyone you meet?

So goes the argument. It's better to grab your own domain (I have Marshallk.com, for example, and wrote about this there as well) and to use that link to then point people out to whatever social networks you happen to be participating in at the time. You'll always own your own domain and you set the rules.

Perhaps this is all a bunch of conspiracy theory, though. Perhaps most people don't care because our "digital identities" and the data we produce and share isn't really that important to us. Maybe we're more than willing to sell that stuff to Facebook for convenience and the social connections we have on the site right now. Millions of people referred to themselves as MySpace.com/PersonOrBandName and did that kill anyone? No big deal. That could very well be how most of Facebook's 200 million users feel about it.

Sure, we'll all probably go grab our names on Facebook on Friday - but the real question is how we will relate to that URL.

Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, and it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.

For example, Google Social Graph API creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, posted a request to add rel="me" markup to the profiles so that the smart applications (like this one) can tie together all the accounts from various websites people list on their Profle pages. Several other people asked to have music playlists or GTalk IM status messages included in Google Profiles. Others asked that Google Profiles by tied to Gmail contacts for easy viewing in other applications.

There's a lot of optional fields you can fill out in a Google Profile now. You're asked to list where you work, where you went to school, where you've worked in the past, what your "superpower" is and other information. When Google Profiles got pushed to center stage yesterday, we voiced a concern that most peoples' concerns about what shows up when people search for their name on Google is too much information. Being told that the answer is to give Google even more info about us, in order to have any influence on our public appearance, seems ironic at least.

The Potential For Innovation

The potential for innovators to make use of these profile pages, if they are marked up well and made available, is really incredible. Just imagine: Dear Google, please show my software to all the people you know with Google Profiles who have listed their Delicious accounts, have bookmarked in Delicious more than 10 links around the web with one of 10 common food-related tags, who live in California, Oregon or Washington, and who have YouTube accounts as well. I want to gather a list of the videos that are most popular this week with food lovers on the West Coast.

That might be a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't be technically difficult if markup was good, the data was exposed well to developers, and Google Profiles caught on well enough to build a large data set. Imagine the incredible variety of potential permutations of profile fields, cross referenced with data found on linked-to third party websites, that such a scenario would offer.

There are simple issues and there are complex ones that come up when public profiles become important on the biggest information discovery site in the world. There are privacy concerns and there are wishes and hopes for data-centric innovation. Who doesn't have thoughts about how they would like to be described to the world? Now's your chance to vote on it.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

It's notable as well that Hulu didn't build its own social network from scratch. That would have been a waste of resources. Instead it is leveraging already established social networks elsewhere.

The most important consequence of the announcement may be that the OAuth protocol used to securely access social networking data without requesting a user's password is now being placed in front of millions more people than it has been before. That's good news.

Concerns About Hulu Friends

On the other hand, it's sad that the OpenID community remains small enough to be left out in the cold by Hulu. In theory the site should be able to add an OpenID login button to its list and pull in standard Friend of a Friend data from any identity provider at all.

Barb Dybwad at Obsessable wonders whether Hulu Friends is actually a reason for Hulu to be less "friendly" with other social video platforms that want to play Hulu content in their communities - specifically Boxee.

Finally, we're concerned that Hulu Friends isn't being featured very prominently on the site. It takes a few too many clicks to get to the friend syncing page on Hulu. We're not seeing Hulu activity pushed out to social network activity streams, either. In fact, it looks like Hulu is using the legacy Facebook API, not the fancy new Facebook Connect. Is the company being overly cautious about Hulu Friends? If they are, its limited adoption could become a self fulfilling prophecy.

All in all, though, we feel positive about Hulu Friends. We hope the company innovates on top of the idea and makes more moves towards integration with the open web.

One of the central features of Chi.mp is that it lets you to assume different personas (public, work, friends). With the current update, Chi.mp, for example, gives you the option publish new blog posts and albums that are either public, or only visible to your work contacts or friends. The new blog editor is basic, but it does the trick. Chi.mp, however, can't yet replace other minimalist blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous.

You can now also set a different theme for each of your personas. Chi.mp gives you 15 default themes and you can also upload your own backgrounds to the service.

The new photo album feature is a bit of a disappointment, however, as it can only handle relatively small images. We couldn't find any exact information about the limits that Chi.mp is enforcing here, but we weren't able to upload any images bigger than two megabytes.

Send Updates to Twitter and Facebook

Maybe the most important update is that Chi.mp can now push status updates to Twitter and Facebook. We assume Chi.mp is using Facebook's new API for publishing these updates.

It's Getting There

With these updates, Chi.mp is inching closer to fulfilling its promise of delivering a centralized hub for your online personas and life-stream.

Until now, we mostly used Chi.mp as an OpenID provider, but thanks to these updates, we will probably start to use it for the rest of its functions as well.

Sadly, Chi.mp is is still invite-only and we haven't heard anything about when it will come out of beta. We have had a grand total of three invites left at this point. Just send an email to chimp AT frederic.otherinbox.com if you want one.

In some respects, these domains are similar to GoDaddy's SmartSpace or Chi.mp, only that these two products are far more flexible.

Online Phonebook

At its best, .tel domains could become something like an online phonebook, though the minimal amount of flexibility will surely disappoint many potential users. In its current state, .tel users can't even add their own logos to these domains.

GoDaddy and Chi.mp

GoDaddy and Chi.mp might be targeting a slightly different audience, but users get far more flexibility with these products, including the ability to aggregate their activity on social networks and to apply different themes and logos to their profiles.

In the end, the success of the .tel domains will depend on third-party developers. If other websites, social networks, or mobile phone address books start supporting these domains (and those of Telnic's competitors), then this might become an easy way to keep address books up to date. But then, you could also do this with any service that provides you with a vCard.

Can it Work?

In an age where the Internet is still synonymous with .com addresses (or their local equivalent) for the vast majority of users, it remains to be seen if these .tel domains will find a lot of takers. Also, the average price for .tel domains for individuals we found from US registrars was around $20, which is a lot more than most people pay for their .com domains - and those give their owners a lot more flexibility.

Being "Fake" Is Now A Crime

A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned.

"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the internet gets to define the criminal law," stated senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman for the Heritage Foundation. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

Authenticating The "Real" You

To address the needs of sites wanting weed out fake personas, users will have to be authenticated in new ways. Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Yahoo's Open Strategy, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider.

No matter who wins, though, it's anonymity that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online  - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation.

The Psychological Impacts Of One Identity

Even the utopian plans of OpenID, which MySpace pledged to support, is being embraced by other big names like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even President-Elect Obama. With this federated identity, one set of credentials can follow you around the net, providing access to hundreds of sites. Although everyday computer users may not understand the technicalities of OpenID, the psychological impact will become apparent.

To the technically unsophisticated, the concept that you are one set of credentials, one username, one person across numerous sites will start people thinking that their activities can be traced, that they are not as anonymous as before...regardless as to whether or not that is true.

The User Data Overlords

Finally, there is Google, the company we joke around as being "our new overlords." The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do." (If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at Google's User Data Empire). 

The terrifying vision of our future that Orwell imagined in his masterpiece, 1984, has been surpassed by miles. Big Brother staring at us through TV screens is nothing - instead, we've managed to create a world where we blindly, willingly, hand over our data and personal identities to a publicly traded company because they promised us they were trustworthy. And like the Eloi people in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, everything we need is provided to us - up until the time we become the dinner for the evils that lurk just below the surface.

Struggling To Adapt

In many ways, our society will struggle to adapt to the changes imposed by the lack of anonymity. Those embarrassing Facebook photos you got tagged in this weekend could lose you your job and prevent you from getting a new one. But how can we draw the line between what's public and private when so many of us have already decided that it's socially acceptable to shove cameras and video recorders in people's faces (without asking!) and publish the captured images to the net immediately?

The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.

When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity.

Not All Bad, Just Different

The truth is, giving up our online anonymity may not be all bad - we'll have a convenient, portable friend graph, for example. We can burn our notebook filled with our usernames and passwords. Our search data will be easily accessible from one place. But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame.

Image credit: iPhone with transparent screen, edans

Google will allow web services to join a limited test of an API based on the OpenID 2.0 protocol that will give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites.

Don't Mention OpenID

One of the key results of Yahoo's OpenID usability study was that users did not understand OpenID and what its logo stands for. Instead, Yahoo promoted the idea of giving users a sign-in button that simply said "Sign In with a Yahoo! ID" (though Chris Messina argues that this could be detrimental to OpenID in the long run).Google and its partners are taking a similar route and are basically bypassing any mention of OpenID itself in favor of a simple message saying "Sign in with a Google Account."

More to Come

Google also announced that it is looking to combine the OAuth and OpenID protocol so that a service can not only request a user's identity through OpenID, but also "request access to information available via OAuth-enabled APIs such as Google Data APIs as well as standard data formats such as Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs."

Tipping Point?

Thanks to this announcement, a wide range of some of the web's largest service providers now supports OpenID: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and AOL.

As John McCrea notes, the result of these announcements from Google and Microsoft this week should be "a massive adoption wave for OpenID all over the web."

Today, though, you'll finally have a new option for sharing who you are with the rest of the world: MeeID.com. This simple web app is easy, straightforward, and entirely customized by you.

MeeID is such a simple application that it hardly needs an explanation. You just go to the web site, sign up for an account and create your profile. Your profile consists solely of a photo you upload and 10 lines (which can be links). That's it. That's your MeeID.

You can see an example MeeID below:

In the above example, Bronson used MeeID to link to his profile on various sites, his online resume, and other sites of interest. However, that's just one way to use this service. MeeID suggests several other ideas, including using MeeID to list your top ten goals, using it to list your contact information like an online business card, putting it in your email signature, and more. We personally like their suggestion of forwarding a custom domain name to the site (Finally, a use for .name URLs?)

Making a MeeID

A search box on the site lets you search the MeeIDs of other users. It found mine by username (sarahintampa) and first name (Sarah), but couldn't locate me when I entered first name and last (Sarah Perez). That could be an issue. We can't be expected to know people's usernames in order to locate their MeeIDs and a one name search query could return an overwhelming number of results once the site becomes more heavily used. Just image having to search for a "John," "Bill," or any other common name in order to locate your friend's MeeID!

Favorites

You can also save your favorite MeeIDs which are then available as a drop-down from the top of the page. Others visiting your profile can view these, too. Although it's understandable that they're trying to keep the app simple, the fact that they limit you to only ten favorites may mean we'll have to make some hard choices in the future as to who gets to appear in that list.

Ads

MeeID is sponsored by advertisers that choose to pay to have their links display beneath every person's MeeID on the site. At launch time, three sponsors were showing: AmberMac, Death Cab For Cutie, and Wired Magazine. The ad is beneath your info and really not that intrusive, so if it helps pay the bills, we're OK with that.

Simple = Good

Overall, MeeID is a nifty little app and one that can be used by anyone - not just social media addicts like ourselves. It doesn't do much, but it doesn't really have to. Sometimes a simple app is just what you need. And it's so easy that anyone can understand how to use it in minutes to quickly claim their place on the web.

1. To Publishers: You need to show Advertisers/Marketers that your audience/community has some spending power. And you need to personalize the content to make it more useful to your audience/community. You need to do both without giving out any private information that would annoy your audience/community and put them at risk of spammers and bad guys.
2. To Advertisers/Marketers: You need to know whether the people reading/watching/listening to content have budgets to spend money. Without getting any private information that you might just possibly be tempted to use for some nefarious spamming campaign.
3. To Users. There are things about you that you want to shout from the rooftops. And things you want to keep away from the eyes of people who might use it to harm you. But you also need to move around online from site to site without any registration hassle.

That was easy enough to write, but it is much more difficult to deliver. Squaring the privacy vs. personalization circle is hard. That's why nothing has yet hit the spot.

The privacy backlash has predictably got the politicians and regulators into the act. Yet, they might just make it worse. A ham-fisted regulation - most regulation related to technology is ham-fisted - would ruin the business for publishers and advertisers and probably be quite easy for the really bad guys to hack.

On top of that, some governments just love to know what all their citizens are doing and that is not always in the citizens' interests. Would you want your government as the repository of all citizen private data? ... That's what I thought!

So who would you trust? Microsoft? Hmm, they tried that with Hailstorm and had their heads handed to them. Maybe Google? After all they already know all your searches and you have to trust them not to use that to identify anything about you personally. And Google said "don't be evil" and we mostly think they included themselves in that injunction. But who knows, even good guys can be tempted or get bored and let the bad guys take over.

So the answer for most people would be "None Of The Above." Which implies that nothing will happen, the status quo will remain. But that is clearly not ideal. It means that your personal information is scattered across lots of sites, most of which will have relatively weak security, so that hackers can easily get it. Just like they did recently at Facebook.

Ok, lets test that. Who would you trust to store all your private information? Please vote in the poll below.

That's why Credentica is important. Look at this 5 minute video to understand the technology. I don't know anything about cryptography, but it appears that the people who do understand it believe that Credentica is technically secure.

So then it is a question of trust. What will Microsoft do with Credentica? Which is a question that nobody has the answer to. Although I am sure many people have opinions -- and feel free to leave them in the comments. Steve Ballmer, what's the deal? What do you have planned?

Quite possibly, Microsoft is still figuring it all out. They do have somebody called Kim Cameron who has been thinking about online identity longer and deeper than most. His bio says:

"Kim Cameron is Chief Architect of Identity in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, where he works on the evolution of Active Directory, Federation Services, Identity Lifecycle Manager, CardSpace and Microsoft's other Identity Metasystem products.

Kim joined Microsoft in 1999 when it bought the ZOOMIT Corporation. As VP of Technology at ZOOMIT, he had invented metadirectory technology and built the first shipping product. Before that he led ZOOMIT's development team in producing a range of SMTP, X.400, X.500, and PKI products.

Kim grew up in Canada, attending King's College at Dalhousie University and l'Université de Montréal. He has won a number of industry awards, including Digital Identity World's Innovation Award (2005), Network Computing's Top 25 Technology Drivers Award (1996) and MVP (Most Valuable Player) Award (2005), Network World's 50 Most Powerful People in Networking (2005), Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Privacy Award (2007) and Silicon.com's Agenda Setters 2007.

Kim blogs at identityblog.com, where he published the Laws of Identity."

He's Canadian, so he can't be evil... and he says he is a "strong proponent of OpenID." (As you can hear/see here.)

So it doesn't look like Microsoft is planning to replace OpenID. Perhaps they just plan to make it secure.

OpenID has the right approach with multiple providers, but as Cameron points out, it is open to abuse by hackers and ID phishers. That is where the OpenID's multiple providers have a branding/trust problem. Out in the wild, who knows the difference between MyVidoop, ClickPass, and EvilPhisher? (I made that last one up).

Credentica had/has a Java SDK. I hope Microsoft keeps this, while also offering a .Net equivalent. For many entrepreneurs the Java vs .Net decision is pretty immaterial, the decision comes down to skill availability. Keeping the Java SDK would increase trust a bit.

Microsoft will have to work hard to forge developer trust in this area. If they can win over developers they have a strong story to tell. The game will shift from just being an ID Provider to offering "secure ID" as a feature of your service. In other words, they will shift this "up the stack," which will be a threat to an ID Provider that plans to use that one feature to build a business, but maybe great for other entrepreneurs.

The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That's hot.

It has always been one of the leaders in innovation, but it's not been the cash-cow that other leading social networks have been. It's also faced more than its share of controversy, blatant breast-feeders had their avatars struck down (not without a fight) in May 2006 and a scorched-earth campaign against sex themed groups knocked some "legitimate literary discussion" off-site in May of 2007. You know what that means: danah boyd is going to be a key asset for LiveJournal, especially in the month of May.

Why is this an exciting announcement? Because a large, important social network just got some of the best minds on the web to engage with it in this formative time of social networking acceleration and change. That means LiveJournal is going to do some very cool things, if they take the Advisory Board as seriously as they should.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of these luminaries should check out their blogs and Wikipedia pages.

• danah boyd's blog, Wikipedia page and the most popular URLs tagged danahboyd on Del.icio.us


• Larry Lessig's blog, Wikipedia entry and Techmeme discussion this week on his decision not to run for US Congress. (Too busy with LiveJournal, just couldn't tell anyone yet.)


• Esther Dyson's blog, Wikipedia page and tweets about Dyson
]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/livejournal_filled_with_awesom.php Social Networks Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:58:40 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick