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 accounts there as a unified identity across the Internet. 

The series of personalites view is more in line with the history of the net and with the libertarian “nobody knows you are a dog” ethos.  The unified view puts convenience above all else.  As Fred wrote recently, convenience is a very powerful force and often trumps other attributes such as quality or security.  I believe that principle is at work here, making the unified approach to identity the stronger contender.  It’s likely that emerging standards such as OpenID and oAuth will play a role, but only as mechanisms “under the hood” without direct exposure to the enduser.  That is to say folks will be able to use their say Yahoo identity on other sites without having to learn what any of these technologies are.

There will be great perceived value in being the provider of identity, which is why I expect this to be a brawl between the big players, which will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit.  In the process, there will be a real premium on portability.  I for one would like to be able to move my identity from say  Yahoo to Facebook without having to do a thing about any of the sites at which I have used my Yahoo identity.  Depending on how many players this coalesces around such portability may arise either as a result of competition (someone starts to offer it as a differentiator and others follow) or we may require a regulatory framework akin to telephone number portability.