ZDNet's Phil Windley has posted a neat discussion of Yahoo's social identity strategy, trials and tribulations.
Money Quote:
After all, one of the chief complaints about identity is users having multiple IDs all over the Web and having to remember lots of different logins. But the Flickr story shows that many people actually prefer having unique IDs (and by extension, identities) at various Web sites. What they dislike is having to remember them and their associated passwords.
As it happens, Yahoo has encountered resistance against merging users' Flickr identities with those contained in the rest of the system. (The "Flicked-Off" Flickr group presents one salient example here.) Phil's explanation that "people have a lot of their personality invested in their Flickr IDs and don't want to give them up" is interesting if a bit of a stretch. I wonder if users reflexively resist any departure from the status quo in terms of identity management -- this may have been a major source of trouble for Spoke, for example.
Either way, Yahoo's experience here has a number of powerful implications for the future of social software. If users react negatively to the merging of two profiles and datasets which are owned by the same company, how will they react to the information trading and consolidation which seems so likely in months and years to come? What are the implications for meta-network platforms such as the one forthcoming from AlwaysON, or for portable profile specs such as FOAF, OpenID, INames or Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)?
I'll have a great deal more to say on this in weeks to come. In the meantime, however, Phil's post is well worth a read. You can access it here.
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