Identitywoman and the New Identity Platform
April 12, 2010
I caught up with Kaliya Hamlin (AKA Identitywoman) the other day. She, along with Doc Searls and a handful of other identity pioneers, are working to make secure identity management a reality. If you’re interested in identity, you should definitely go to the upcoming 10th Internet Identity workshop in Mountain View, May 17-19. Like most events Kaliya attends these days, it’s an un-conference: a conference where everyone shows up and they decide each day’s agenda together that same morning. In fact Kaliya could write the book on un-conferences, and I hope she does.
Here is an excellent 10-minute summary of where we are today and where we’re going …
I wrote a bit about identity in my book, Pull. In fact, I wrote an entire chapter, but I had to leave it out because it was too technical for the business reader I hoped would buy and read my book. Instead, I wove the basic concepts throughout the book as needed. Identity is bigger than FaceBook. Much bigger. Identity is an important missing link in constructing the online data locker and other aspects of the coming semantic web I talk about in my book. After brewing for several years, it’s starting to percolate up to the real world. Soon, we’ll have an early platform people can start building on and testing. It’s similar to the early days of HTML, when people just hacked their own web site using whatever tools they could find. They used HTML, and the more they used it, the stronger it became. Now, with identity so closely tied to security, we need strong standards and many companies agreeing to use them. And we are getting there. Here are a few resources to learn what’s going on, and I’ll update you with news as things happen. Be sure to subscribe to me on Twitter.
Read the Burton Group blogs, which are very well written.
Kim Cameron, who wrote the Laws of Identity, has a very good blog. He’s currently talking about minimal disclosure, which means giving away as little as necessary in each step toward acquiring or using something.
Tweet this, sports fans: the Web now has almost two billion subscribers. Mobile phone networks have almost 5 billion. The Internet is MUCH bigger than FaceBook or Twitter! And we are now preparing the standards and protocols for people to have web-scale identity and privacy tools. Here are two links that are very geeky but show the way:
Paul Trevithick’s blog about identity and social networks – latest entry
