Relentless Inquiry

Those clever folks at Livejournal have launched another project, a decentralized client/server based identity web called OpenID. As the specs say, it’s not a web of TRUST, it’s a web of IDENTITY. This is something that’s missing from most of the social networking software (along with granularity, but that’s a hot button we won’t press at this precise moment). In social networks as largely implemented today, you build webs of trust but the identity verification is left to the user. There’s no identity publishing, either, and each service makes you annoy the friends that you have with subscription emails and/or search stumblingly through whatever metrics the site supports to try to see if your friends are already on the site. I don’t see anything yet about how OpenID might address the identity publishing aspect, but it’s certainly possible.