Facebook joins the OpenID movement!
Thanks to @jowyang for spreading the word announced yesterday that Facebook has
thrown it's weight in with OpenID, joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo! on OpenID's board. I think this is great news, because getting the big players together is the first step in a long haul to helping make the social web more useful, trustworthy and important to the broader population.
My opinion might differ from others' a bit in terms of the importance of this first step - critical mass - in that I think a centralized login ID is only a prerequisite to the true impact of this movement, which is ultimately (multiple) personal identity management. What's the difference? Centralized login is a quantitative improvement - reducing the number of logins you have to manage across multiple platforms (and thus potentially improving security over them). It certainly is beneficial and will reduce barriers to joining multiple networks, but it's not the holy grail. The holy grail is being able to centrally own and manage your personal identities. In other words, having one identity which you use on Facebook and LiveJournal, and managing it through the same tools as you do your separate professional identity on LinkedIn and Business Exchange. OpenID does this really well, or might once they get the buy-in and support to build out what is now very basic functionality in this regard.
Why is Personal ID Management (PIM!) so important? Simple, people won't fully engage the social web until they have the same prerogatives for identity management online as they do offline. Offline, we dress differently, talk differently and share different kinds of information with others depending on the network we're interacting with. This is a qualitative judgment we make about "who we present ourselves as" in each of these situations. We assess the risks and benefits of information sharing differently depending on the social context. Today, Facebook is used by business people and family networks, often by the same people who - like in real life - mingle their networks. And if you announce you broke up with your boyfriend or left a job to one set, it's too easy for the other set to find out whether you like it or not. I've tried changing the privacy settings to modify this but it's not so easy. If you want your business contacts to see your work history, they're gonna see if it changes. (Others have the same problem - must be logged into FB to view). When we can manage these issues online as easily as offline we'd do it more and more naturally.
The stated goals for OpenID over the next year are improved usability and security. Goodness knows these are important! I've written about the usability issue quite a bit (here and here) and I agree that it's not going to be enough to simply be able to define your multiple personas as distinct. This is how OpenID does it today:
It's pretty intuitive, giving you different picture, name, contact and even language options. But when we start using these multiple personas on many networks the usability will become more and more challenging. While you're interacting in one environment you might be thinking just before you push "post"... Who am I? What contact info do I have here with this persona? What permissions and preferences have I set? And perhaps most importantly - which friends can see what information about me here?
Now some people may be wary of this multiple PIM, worrying that people will use this capability to be inauthentic, schizophrenic or to outright lie about who they are. Sadly, I'm afraid that happens now - both online and offline - the tools just make it easier for us to manage these choices of authenticity; they don't necessarily improve our ethics or mental health by virtue of their mere existence. We humans will still have to do that.
But, as Michael Wesch and his students explore so entertainingly, people can actually benefit in many ways from the ability to explore their own identities online. Dr. Wesch points this out in personal terms, how people explore personal and intimate parts of themselves, growing themselves as human souls; but it is equally true of the Personal Branding movement in the business context as well. And by decoupling these two important aspects of identity management, and providing the tools to manage them separately, OpenID is (perhaps inadvertantly, in an effort to enhance its contributors' business models) actually fueling both the personal and professional movements that help the social human animal evolve.
All in all, I think this is a great move for both business and human reasons. Kudos to OpenID, Facebook and whole gang. Now, if only we could be flies on the wall to watch the fireworks and drama as the 800 pound gorillas try to hash out these important, complex and hugely sticky issues.
