Identity Management 2.0

I spent an hour studying this new “thing” called OpenID and I seriously cannot figure out what it’s value is.   Perhaps I’m foolish and I generally lack the propensity to wrap my brain about new concepts but then I’d like to think that’s not the case.

I do see the value in having a way to centrally authenticate yourself when visiting the dozens/hundreds of registration-required websites and I think OpenID is on the right track to solve that problem – provided it gets the momentum it needs.

Then through my blog-hopping, I came across this little post about how today’s teenagers and adults differ in how they manage online identities (and even e-mail addresses).   In short: teenagers have no problem with having a handful of e-mail addresses and creating new ones when they’ve forgotten the password to one of them.  Adults, on the other hand, are always looking to have some kind of single sign-on system – perhaps a unique enough username (mine is “niyogi” if I can manage to beat my brothers to registering on a site – otherwise “sniyogi” or if I’m really late “saniyogi”) that will be easy to remember across the sites they browse.

Soon, it will be the case that you’ll know when your child has grown up when they start wanting to consolidate their online identity rather than explode it into fragments or recycle it.

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Published:
03.07.07 / 8am
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