Brennan’s Blog

Identity management has been coming into vogue lately. The push is going towards distributed single sign-on and I believe this trend is largely due to the rise of web services, AJAX and the real world application of mashups. And as existing web powerhouses like Yahoo! have acquired other web properties, such as Flickr.com there has been a real need to integrate the identity systems.

Now Yahoo! has published Browser-Based Authentication, or BBAuth. It is a system to allow existing Yahoo! users to log into your website which represents some amazing potential. The first part of the solution is to leverage an existing user account from Yahoo! so that you do not have to create a new account for every site which requires an account. The second part is the ability to use and manage the data which is a part of the Yahoo! account.

Think about it for a moment and you should be able to come up with many powerful ideas. With the Membership Provider available in ASP.NET 2.0, I could build a custom provider to use BBAuth and allow users to log into my websites without ever having to create an account. It also gives my users the option to jump over to Yahoo! web properties and use those tools, all with the same identity.

Unfortunately this competes directly with CardSpaces (aka InfoCard) and Google Account Authentication. I predict there will soon be a full blown identity war, and hopefully it blows over quickly. The potential to minimize you required identities and reduce the work necessary to manage your profile data is worth the effort to make it happen.

And I have felt for a long time that the internet has been a failure in a lot of ways. People use email, instant messaging, web forums and newsgroups to communicate. Studies have shown that as peope have become addicted to the internet, they have felt less connected with real people. The fake identities people have used to chat in IRC chat rooms can be replaced with real identities to do real things. I know people, including myself, have used resources like Yahoo! Groups to search for people in the local area who share common interests such as photography, music, sports, etc. But the identities in these groups are typically fabricated fantasies. They are not real people.

The alternative to seek out people with common interests is to attend events and visit places where you might randomly meet such people. That is what we all have done, but the potential to find 100's of people living in your area who share a common interest and asking them all to organize has amazing potential. At the spur of the moment I could decide I wanted to organize a baseball game at the park down the street and within moments I can send out invitations to 100 people (strangers even) living in the immediate area. It is unfortunate that this simple concept has been so elusive.

With the sharing a common identities it makes it really possible for a person to maintain a common identity including a profile of their interests and location to allow others to find them. And when you combine real identities with real interests you allow the fake world of internet communities to become real communities in the real world. As that happens the internet will start to realize its true potential.