Identity and the Web 2.0 Browser
In the conclusion to my very first Peer Pressure essay, written about a year ago, I speculated about what might be killer features for a next-generation web browser. Looking at this list, it’s clear that, while progress has been made on a couple of fronts, there’s still a long way to go to achieve the vision of a “Web 2.0″ browser. Identity management is a burning hot topic, but not much has happened yet in terms of real-world implementations for actual users. Editing capabilities are mostly in the same shambolic state they were twelve months ago (though, thanks to rich web browser-hosted editors like Flock, there’s some hope on the horizon). Peer-to-peer communication is still divorced from the web browsing experience. And browsers continue to speak HTML fluently but develop a thick foreign accent when forced to communicate in XML.
We’ve focused heavily on some of these areas in developing AllPeers 2.0, and some new ones have cropped up along the way. I’ve already talked about our RDF/XML capabilities, which are key to achieving data reusability. I’ll try to discuss the rest in more detail over the next few days, starting with identity.
Doc Searls has some interesting commentary on his blog about the need for decentralized identity infrastructure. I particularly like his assertion that a workable identity infrastructure will be bottom up rather than top down. To achieve this vision, however, you need to have some sort of decentralized, extensible framework.
Our approach to identity is to use a basic profile that contains almost no information: just your name and a unique ID. This profile takes the form of an RDF resource, so it’s easy to extend it by linking it to further resources. Each resource can be signed by a third-party to verify authenticity. Essentially, we’re replacing the built-in Firefox password manager with an analogous system based on digital certificates that is far more powerful and secure. This differs from systems like Microsoft’s InfoCards mainly in its braindead simplicity. We haven’t invented anything; we’re just serving up signed RDF resources on demand.
Strong identity on the client doesn’t just mean single sign on. It also means that you can build up a very rich profile on your own machine, instead of having bits and pieces spread across a thousand web servers (run, of course, by evil faceless corporations). This, in turn, opens up the possibility of plugging-and-playing remote services to produce cool new applications (imagine bolting matchmaking onto a massively multiplayer game, for example). We’re not expecting our system to take over the world, considering the massive competition, but hopefully it will serve us well until a clear winner emerges in the identity stakes.
[web 2.0]
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make it more sense !
Comment by 고은짱-..-v — 10/17/2005 @ 12:47 pm
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thank you nice sharing
Comment by cep program — 5/14/2008 @ 9:37 pm