@Lachlan: I’m still missing your point I think… The point is not that we’ve arrived necessarily — more that we’re in transition, and we’re trying to explain/capture what’s at the heart of that transition. Of course, it’s always hard to write history as it’s happening, but this is our nearest understanding at the moment (subject to change of course!).

I meant that the article basically implies that typical users of the web had some gaping hole in their experience that and it wasn’t filled until relatively recently, but now everything’s okay and we’re in the future. Like there are certain states the web must achieve somehow.

I guess looking back at it, that may be true (or at least truthy) but writing about what we have now as if it was the only thing we could have had but it just took a while is what triggered my comment.

Is my meaning clearer now?

http://www.slideshare.net/publy/databanking-1297258

People Were sitting around in 2003 asking about personhood on the web – The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet. http://asn.planetwork.net published in that year does just that. People involved in the community that wrote that paper are still involved in the current “identity” community innovating. Another paper in 2004 outlines some open standards to do it The Social Web paper – http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=reed0704

XRD the discovery protocol is the piece of their work that has gotten the most uptake.

The Identity Gang formed in 2004 and the subsequent community conference Internet Identity Workshop is still going and has moved many of the standards/efforts Chris outlines forward. Our 9th conference is happening this November in Mountain View.

Fairly easy to write that in retrospect, I’d say, but it’s not as if this the endstate.