Replies:

> Certainly those of us who understand the social and technical constraints related to managed identity care deeply about these issues. But how do we convey the importance of a lack of digital freedom to average users? It seems oddly similar to Richard Stallman’s efforts evangelizing free and open source software.

I think stories work well. In my talk, I focused on a personal experience, which I’m sure will become increasingly common.

I also think that many people won’t relate to this idea at all — and that’s okay. What’s important is that there is a clear, actionable message that explains how to support this idea and why it’s actually a good idea for the web and the network in general. It may not be completely obvious yet, but I think the picture is starting to emerge as various services end up shutting down or being acquired.

> Facebook’s incentive to adopt OpenID is tenuous at best. They are 300M users strong and have enormous data capital. Why would they want to allow people to port their identity out? Particularly if they are as aware of it’s importance as we all are?

Because they get that the more places you can use your identity, the more valuable they become. The reason why they haven’t adopted OpenID is that the user experience of choice sucks — choice doesn’t fit into a one-click button.

Facebook wants to be everywhere its members are — which means going wherever the web goes. OpenID is a mechanism to achieve that — though Facebook Connect is currently a more powerful set of technologies (but requires a greater degree of integration).

> Namespace ownership needs to be simplified for personal non-commercial namespaces. More importantly – if we really want to move to a people-centric web, should it not require proprietary service providers like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. to host users’ personal non-commercial namespaces?

Yep, exactly. My hope is that competition from the Twitters and Facebooks of the web will force more complicated providers to simplify their offerings. And I don’t know when it’ll happen, but I’d love to see someone go about building an open source or non-profit identity provider.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Not trolling or naysaying… but consider some of these challenges…

+ Certainly those of us who understand the social and technical constraints related to managed identity care deeply about these issues. But how do we convey the importance of a lack of digital freedom to average users? It seems oddly similar to Richard Stallman’s efforts evangelizing free and open source software.

+ Facebook’s incentive to adopt OpenID is tenuous at best. They are 300M users strong and have enormous data capital. Why would they want to allow people to port their identity out? Particularly if they are as aware of it’s importance as we all are?

+ Namespace ownership needs to be simplified for personal non-commercial namespaces. More importantly – if we really want to move to a people-centric web, should it not require proprietary service providers like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. to host users’ personal non-commercial namespaces?