I remember a spirited debate in one of my senior-level web programming courses this past spring on the Ultimate Web Application. It would be a meta-application that sat on top of other web applications, with all of the functionality of every other program. Most importantly, it would allow a user to have a unified identity across other web applications.
Open ID accomplishes the technical part of maintaining a single identity without making it simple to link those identities together. It’s a piece of the puzzle, but not the entire answer. (If you want an Open ID and you don’t already have one or use any service on this list, I recommend Vox, which creates one for you as part of signing up for their site.)
On the other hand, Wink is an identity portfolio application. You enter your username(s) from various sites around the web and Wink aggregates it all, including some of your data, like Flickr photos, in one place. Wink then provides you with widgets that you can put back on (some of) those sites. There’s also a nifty API that I haven’t investigated too deeply yet.
We may be seeing the creation of the two halves of that Ultimate Web Application. Now, let’s merge them together, make them open, and finally have a single answer to the question: Who are you?
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OpenID has started to be more important to me, because as someone signing up for a few sites a week (maybe a few a day?), I’m getting a little tired of writing the same things on the same lines of the same forms, all with different colors.
Identity management, even just social identity, is becoming a NEED, not a feature.
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