What is the future of online identity?

People are talking about Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and OpenID ebulliently. This urges me to read more about digital identity and online identity. Yes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But I wonder what the future of online identity is when people are making open standards for user-centric digital identity everywhere.

I have seen carefully identity 2.0 keynote of Dick – CEO of Sxip Identity although I had known before that Erick from Techcrunch threw .... to Dick’s face. But not everything around Dick is ..... I agree with him in some points. Identity is not only about name, photo, birthday,… it’s also about what you say, what you do, what others say about you,… But actually I have no idea about Identity 2.0. Well, recently people put 2.0 after everything they claim that it’s making a revolution, or at least as what I see in Vietnam. What Tedd Dziuba said is true in a sense:

A revolution doesn’t mean that you pseudo-sexually “poke” someone from Facebook to MySpace. It doesn’t mean that you can type in your password once and have access to every authenticated service out there. It certainly doesn’t mean that you can make a word processor program work when you’re not connected to the internet (we’ve had that feature for decades). No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded.

More about stories around “identity”, Kaliya at IdentityWoman.com linked to my previous post and said that she feels strange when people like Facebook Connect because of “real identity”. I think I will have to explain more detail about this point.

What do you need to identify someone in a (online) community?

I have different identities in different (online) communities even somewhere I use the same account names. Each identity is “real” in the community it belongs to, only that not every relates to my real life (or at least my life people around me usually see in reality). Yeah, your avatar, your status, your account name, your articles, your conversations,…that’s enough for me to identify who you are in the community and it’s “real” in sphere of the community.

You choose what to show up in real life.

In my opinion, one of characteristics to distinguish Facebook from other Social Network sites is “real identity”. “Real” here means your identity in Facebook has connection to your real life. Come back to Facebook Connect, you don’t have to connect every sites, every communities to Facebook. It’s your choice. You choose which site you want to display your activities there in Facebook. In other words, that means you choose what you want to show in real life. Facebook also lets you set privacy settings to make sure right people see right activities you want they see.

For example, you can make a video of you having sex, upload to porntube or whatever, submit to reddit with the title “The most f*cking amazing sex scene” and broadcast on Twitter that “I have never seen anything amazing like this video…” with different identities. And what do people think when looking at this in each community? Just a sex tape leaked and someone uploaded it, another found that it’s amazing and wanted to share to everybody, that’s all. If you want to show these whole things as yours in reality, connect it to Facebook somehow.

In my case, I am blogging with my real identity so that integrating Facebook Connect into my blog is worth as what I said in my previous article.

PS: I did have to remove the Facebook Connect plugin for Wordpress because it’s still buggy. Hope it will be more stable soon in next version.