The biggest problem with Web 2.0 today is….

January 10, 2009 by chuq · Comments
Filed under: The Online Life 

What’s wrong with this picture?:


As I clean up loose ends getting ready to launch the new chuqui.com, I’m finding little details all over the place that need fixing — like my yahoo/mybloglog profile showing me working at a place I left 18 months ago. oops

And one of the great unsolved problems of the web 2.0 space: everyone wants me to create my profile on their service (because, of course, that information has value).

Now, what’s best for me, the individual, is to have some way to create this information once, maintain it in a single place, and then distribute it out to everyone to use as a shared resource.

Now, the hassle is that every service will be really happy to do that, as long as the single place is their place, and all of the other services pull from them.

So we still have this tower of babel as far as user profiles.

Who’s going to bell this particular cat? anyone?

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  • (bringing over comments from the old blog):

    Kevin Marks, Jan 10, 2009:



    We all are. With OpenSocial we're coming up with uniform profile representations (see PortableContacts) and ways to authenticate and authorize their use (OpenID and OAuth), and ways to feed activities back to the places you want to share or review them (Activity Streams).

    Google Friend Connect is built on these open standards to let you delegate your profile, friends and activities on a site to the places you prefer to host them.
  • ChodaBoy
    PortableContacts and Activity Streams sounds great. Open standards for the exchange of this type of information is certainly needed. I have different "lives" on the Internet. One is work-related. One is family-related. One is friend-related. One might be Palm-enthusiast-related. Etc. I want to manage my information centrally, but control what info is distributed to whom.
  • (bringing over comments from the old blog:

    Jeffrey Hoover, Jan 11, 2009:



    Maybe Facebook will rule the world? :)

    Seriously, I'd hate to be John Smith and try to have people find *me* on the web via various sites.

    OpenID works, sort of. But not all site use it, obviously, and furthermore, even sites that use it don't allow all of the "root" sites.

    Sorry I don't have the answer. Maybe someday in the science reality of our future there will be bio-metric IDs that are pervasive. No, maybe that's not a good idea either.
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