Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have no comments at all, to have moderated comments, to allow comments *and* delete them after the fact (...

Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have no comments at all, to have moderated comments, to allow comments *and* delete them after the fact (...

If you operate a site or service and want to accept identity from large third parties, you encounter a bewildering array of implementations. Some are fairly proprietary, such as Facebook. Others, such as Google, are based on a standard but with a twist. New ones come along, such as Twitter, and present their own versions. This makes building them all a real resource challenge. On top of that there is a real possibility of getting it wrong and creating a usability or worse yet a security probl...

If you operate a site or service and want to accept identity from large third parties, you encounter a bewildering array of implementations. Some are fairly proprietary, such as Facebook. Others, such as Google, are based on a standard but with a twist. New ones come along, such as Twitter, and present their own versions. This makes building them all a real resource challenge. On top of that there is a real possibility of getting it wrong and creating a usability or worse yet a security probl...

The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

There have been some complaints that the big sites want to be providers of identity but don’t want to accept identity from smaller sites. I happen to think that’s (mostly) OK for right now but also constitutes an opportunity (see second paragraph). To become trusted providers of identity the large sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon?, eBay? et al) will have to make significant investments in monitoring and administration. Spammers and others will spend a lot of time trying to create fake a...

There have been some complaints that the big sites want to be providers of identity but don’t want to accept identity from smaller sites. I happen to think that’s (mostly) OK for right now but also constitutes an opportunity (see second paragraph). To become trusted providers of identity the large sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon?, eBay? et al) will have to make significant investments in monitoring and administration. Spammers and others will spend a lot of time trying to create fake a...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

I wrote yesterday about why I believe there is a brawl brewing over identity. In that post I suggested that convenience will be the main driver for the adoption of a “unified identity” model in which the large players (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc) will become the identity providers for their users across the Net. But I don’t think it’s the only driver. The unified approach is a more direct translation of our physical world identity model to the online world. While I may ch...

I wrote yesterday about why I believe there is a brawl brewing over identity. In that post I suggested that convenience will be the main driver for the adoption of a “unified identity” model in which the large players (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc) will become the identity providers for their users across the Net. But I don’t think it’s the only driver. The unified approach is a more direct translation of our physical world identity model to the online world. While I may ch...

We are spending a lot of time thinking about how identity will play itself out on the Internet. We are constantly running into the limitations of the existing arrangements even when companies from our portfolio are trying to collaborate. While there is definitely movement afoot with Facebook, Google and others extending their authentication to third parties and possibly moving the OpenID standard along (see previous posts on this). But there is also another candidate for identity at least in ...

We are spending a lot of time thinking about how identity will play itself out on the Internet. We are constantly running into the limitations of the existing arrangements even when companies from our portfolio are trying to collaborate. While there is definitely movement afoot with Facebook, Google and others extending their authentication to third parties and possibly moving the OpenID standard along (see previous posts on this). But there is also another candidate for identity at least in ...

One of the really big brawls brewing on the Internet is over identity. At the risk of grossly simplifying there appear to be two fundamentally different notions of identity on the net. One camp views identity as a “series of personalities” across different sites and services with their owners controlling to which degree they link these personalities up into a single identity. In the other camp are the large players such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook which want folks to use their ac...

One of the really big brawls brewing on the Internet is over identity. At the risk of grossly simplifying there appear to be two fundamentally different notions of identity on the net. One camp views identity as a “series of personalities” across different sites and services with their owners controlling to which degree they link these personalities up into a single identity. In the other camp are the large players such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook which want folks to use their ac...