How do you think about the hierarchy of identity provisioning? One way to describe the range of services a user engages with is to move from general to specific; another way is to move from public to private.

One example: Does it make sense to visit Paypal for the first time with Google as my provisioner or with BankofAmerica as my provisioner? Both have access to different and perhaps discrete pools of user information.

Will there be a natural tendency for users to select as providers those services that have the broadest pool of user data? So that when they are asked to delegate permissions they do not have to enter additional security credentials? If that is the case, then does this give those generalist providers an unfair advantage over niche services that are delegated to, instead of delegated from?

The exercise is necessary, but I’m not sure what including the browser brings to the whole thing: people need a storage for social interactions that ought to be connected to their mails, cellphone, SNS/activity streams/feed-reader and… their browser — but apart from you being a graphic designer in need of mock-up, why would Mozilla make it where Flock failed, Chrome hasn’t tried and Facebook (Connect) somewhat made it? F8 will only ask this question harder.

The biggest problem I see in all that isn’t the service: it’s having people agreeing on what interactions are. Facebook has been very good at making 400M people fall into an acceptable on what are essential expectations from a certain subset of their relations — but Zuckerberg doesn’t care for breastfeeding, curse-words or any Vampire game: he cares that most of his users are happy, together. The newly hard part being “together”.

Do I want to have advice based on the sex-log of my new girlfriend and her geeky, über-lifeloging ex? Convenient, but creepy, huh? More generally, to work, any solution like the one you discuss should be able to accommodate four contradictory situations:
* will your boss be happy you use those (and should you bring your personal browser at work, where it could be scanned)?
* can you job-hunt safely while working elsewhere?
* can you safely accommodate being unfaithful with that tech?
* what happens when you dump your boyfriend, and who decides what he should know about the new one?

Any tech, including public reading, accommodates: “Guys! I found this great book—let me show it to you.” Only some weird, genially dysfunctional Microsoft Exchange can reassure a psyched and lame co-worker that his e-mails have been opened that the only reason no one came to the meeting was a poorly resolved scheduling conflict that no one could have anticipated.

My guess is that the solution to all those isn’t software, but society’s expectation. Sit on Flock for a while, until people know how to make sense of it. In the meantime, unclear solutions tend to leverage their misunderstandings.