Lost in the crowd / Hampi, India

What is the biggest problem on the Internet? Lack of security?

Or is it a problem of identity?

What is the best way to establish your identity? Meaning, what data / interface / virtual ID do you really, truly own and control? What is the most enduring, permanent, controllable, personally attributable and authenticated artifact of identity?

How about mailing address? Phone number? Email address? Open ID? Social network profile? Personal website? Our domain name? Social security number?

Maybe if we all bought LifeLock, then could we publicly display permanent, personal information to establish identity?

Oh, identity theft, you say.

I ask: is identity theft a problem of information being too closed, and not open enough? Is the problem the lack of security or the difficulty in establishing identity?

Could the answer be a .me address? (or, well, get people to use the .name extension) Meaning, is the answer be to control a DOMAIN rather than a URL?

Delegation and domain-centric identity means greater competition and innovation between providers not just to attract new entrants to the market but to retain current customers. It means I have sole control over who I am across the web.

By owning our domain, we own our identity throughout the Internet, across websites, across networks.

If we own our brand, we own our identity.

Is this a fundamental reason why social networks will be like air?

Why should we even care about identity?

The existence or lack thereof of identity shapes our interactions on the Internet. A traceable, consistent, enduring identity means we’re not playing a single-turn game anymore.

Economists have shown that we will make different decisions if we think our interaction with someone will be one turn or many turns. Game theory provides a wealth of academic research, life provides a wealth of practical examples.

What does a social network create? Social networks aggregate interactions, creating an enduring, searchable history of our movements, traceable for the life of the data. Think of what the Facebook News Feed creates: the lengthy, (somewhat) public line-by-line results of a multi-person, multi-turn game. Disqus, for example, aggregates our comments throughout the web, turning one-off or even single-site commentators into multi-turn, multi-site conversationalists.

Think about what Google does: it indexes our public (and sometimes private) moments on the web, providing an easy way to find what we’ve said and what others have said about us. Think that matters? Ask anybody who has fired off an ill-advised email, or job searchers worried about their online presence.

If we can create an “identifiable web”, we create an online “malleable surface” that reflects our online movements and provides feedback to people, a mechanism that removes anonymity, makes us consider our actions and reminds us that a person is on the other end of that send button. The existence of identity shapes our actions in concrete, potentially value-creating ways.

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Where to go from this? What would I create? What would I invest in? What would I spend my time doing? Creating services that help to aggregate interactions by providing a consistent, authenticated identity throughout dispersed networks online and offline networks.

Many, many more questions than answers…