Funny, I posted my own musings on this topic only a month ago: http://my.opera.com/claudeb/blog/2007/11/06/a-web-of-my-own. Briefly put, I’m with alphager and Mike on this. If I can have my identity scattered over the 'net, then why not? After all, it’s an individual choice, not affecting anyone else.
Check out spokeo.com, it checks your friends’ activities on a lot of different online communities. I was amazed about the amount of stuff it dugg out about my friends
In reply to Jonathan’s comment above, the open source Pidgin IM client (http://pidgin.im - very good native Windows build too) enables you to use one client for a whole load of networks, including the commercial ones such as MSN and AOL.
It’s a godsend to me as most of the non-tech people I speak to in North America use AOL, whilst most of us Brits use MSN (in my experience).
Can you imagine the privacy-implications of one central marketing company owning every profile about you?
OpenID hopes to avoid that.
When somebody asks me which is your website, I usually answers with my blog URL, but that is for the matter of simplicity. I have good enough number od accounts in many networks. But I am noticing a real difficulty myself in managing all these accounts. It will be a real good idea if we have a central place where we can manage (atleast view) activities.
OT:
I struggle to write one lousy blog four to five times a week.
Your struggle is to our pleasure.
You posts are typically quite insightful where many blogs could vaporize without anyone noticing. Some (of us) just like to hear ourselves talk.
I would echo the thought that they all have different purposes.
I try to split my online identity between two major persona’s, Andrew January which is who I am on Facebook and that is where I do things for the consumption of my friends - photo’s of nights out, communication etc.
I then have my online persona of [ICR] (or increasingly aJanuary because websites are annoyingly restrictive) which I use for anything else on the internet. Forums, blogs, even my own blog.
I like that separation. I am not a simple being that can be summed up wholly by one identity. My friends are not really interested in the content of my blog, and people on the internet don’t care that I got drunk last night.
Which one of them is the real me? Both of them.
I think some online identities fail where others succeed.
I went to high school in Turkey and most of my friends came to college here so I am using Facebook regularly to keep up with them; I have to say Facebook made it really easier for us to organize events, have little chat or share pictures -on our private groups mostly.
Last.fm basically requires no maintenance on my part; it keeps track of what I’m listening and I occasionally use it to listen to radio when I’m bored with my own music.
I have a reddit and digg account to vote and comments but have no profile. But still people can see what I like and stuff.
Del.icio.us is where all my links at and again it is basically no maintenance other than submitting the links.
I take a lot of pictures and use Flickr to store them all in a central and offsite location.
Basically what I’m trying to say is online profiles where some information is collected succeeds because rather than just creating a “profile”, you use the service and you create your online identity by just being yourself. I disagree that you just have a central location for your online self; some services are just better than others.
It’s like a digital horcrux. At least you don’t have to kill someone to make the new splinter of your identity.
Hey Now Jeff,
I personally think that it’s good to have many profiles out there even if they only point back to an official home page. For instance if you had a myspace or facebook profile that pointed back to codinghorror.com. You don’t have to maintain or post there but some people may only be into and go to myspace or facebook so you’d be able to reach them much more easily. Web 2.0 is here to stay, I also think the biggest reason we go online is to interact with other people. I also think that it’s nice to be broken into parts say a person’s linked in profile is more business than a myspace which is nice. So after reading this post I’m now following my first person on tweeter.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
I’ve been thinking it would be nice to have a generic ID system. Nothing your social or credit cards are linked to, but something you could use at all the places that want you to ‘check in’.
For instance, on my keychain, I have 4-5 barcodes for various stores or establishments, that I allow to know when I’ve visted. If we could create something like this, a universal ‘ME’ ID, not linked to anything special, other than our name, and preferences, and have it require a pin code or password, our wallets wouldn’t be as heavy, and our digital life would be much smoother.
Something like this to carry with us:
ME_ID = 357951456852123456789
ME_Display_Name = John Doe
A central database would have something like this:
ME_ID = 357951456852123456789
ME_Display_Name = John Doe
ME_Passcode = xCQ#R@fvaslkdvj#@$ (Salted and Encrypted of course)
A site or store would have a way to swipe, and enter a pin. The site/store would check the central database to authenticate, then, if valid, the site/store could lookup any data they have on that person.
Again, nothing private, just something so I don’t have to have so many store cards and password.
Thanks for the kind words! I should point out – the list of IDs on my site is somewhat deliberately ridiculous. I wrote a bit about that when I put them on my site:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/10/thanks-for-the-add.html
It’s also probably worth mentioning that I think the proliferation of identities with so little control over how they’re connected and exposed is a pretty serious problem, and one I’m lucky enough to get to try to fix at my day job:
http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/09/were_opening_th.html
Thanks also for kicking off a great conversation – I think it’s a good sign so many of us are thinking about these things.
Anil’s link list is more of a commentary of how ridiculous things have gotten than a useful summary of his online identity. Someone could standardize online profiles but few websites would participate.
take a look at this strip (and the next one)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071212
they describe the problem quite well
I like having disparate identities. My work networks don’t need to know about my gaming, and vice versa. I can present myself as I need to be for each situation, just as in real life.
Add the obvious problems related to letting anyone “own” my sum identity, and I don’t see any advantages.
I recently joined claimID (http://claimid.com) as a solution to this exact problem. It’s a nice way to manage your online identities with OpenID.
Here’s claimID profile of Fred Stutzman, one of the founders, as an example of how it works: http://claimid.com/fred
Best to keep identities separate.
There’s one guy who has an interesting Usability blog, but it’s on the same domain as his Martial Arts blog, and gets blocked by our corporate filter.
Keep the profiles separate. I could be interested in someone’s technology blogging but not interested in their family or gaming profiles. I don’t want to see everything coming to me in one downstream.
Less time for me to do the filtering.
I maintain my identity across 0 sites. Please don’t let them find me. Panics
My solution to the “multiple identities” problem is simple: I maintain a single blog (raamdev.com) and add a link to it inside the profiles of other sites (various forums, Facebook, MySpace, Technorati, Digg, etc). I fill in as little personal information as possible in the hope that those who want to know more about me will visit my blog.
If that particular site is a social networking site, I add a note that says I won’t respond to messages sent to me via that particular sites messaging mechanism and that the person must visit my blog to contact me.
The personalization of blogs is often more detrimental than beneficial, since personalizing a blog makes your personal life public – it ceases to be your personal life. I wrote a post on this topic:
http://blog.raamdev.com/2007/02/27/the-impersonalization-of-blogs/
This is my first time commenting here on Coding Horror, but I’m a frequent reader and as a fellow programmer I enjoy the high quality of your posts. Thanks Jeff!