Fred Wilson has a response today to Eric Schmidt’s declaration in Edinburgh that Google+ is an “identity service”. He asks and answers his own question. “whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to.” Of course Facebook is also an identity service. Facebook Connect is the means of distributing it. And of course Facebook too is built using real names because “they need you to”. At this level FaceBook and Google have much in common, and both are vying
[read more]...Here is a book I wrote in 1988 for Penguin. It is available free on Google books. And as of today I can embed it in a web page. With the recent rise to prominence in the UK of the BNP, it may be an interesting read again. At the time I used a non-de-plume (Keith Tompson) because it was actually dangerous to be an open and active anti-racist. It also has some relevance to the internet debate about race hatred.
[read more]...Nicolas Popp – a leading advocate of Open Identity and data solutions – posted on his VeriSign blog today following the rather heated discussions that have ensued since Google announced its Friend Connect product recently. Nico’s employer – VeriSign – along with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and others, is a member of the board of the OpenID foundation.Nico’s primary argument (emphasis mine) is that: Undoubtedly, data portability is the natural child of federated identity (more on that in a future post). Personal and social data are an important part of any consumer identity’. Like identifiers, credentials and profile attributes, social
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