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by stickfigure 5454 days ago
I'm not saying that identity management won't be an ongoing problem, especially if large repositories of identity rise and fall with fashion.

On the other hand, email is already known to be an unstable key for identity. And the "market" for identity providers is a lot more mature than it was 5 years ago. Besides, what if Friendster had established itself as a public identity provider 5 years ago? Maybe we would be using Friendster instead of Facebook today. Who knows.
2 comments
bct 5454 days ago
> On the other hand, email is already known to be an unstable key for identity.

Would be happier if there was only one company that provided email service and you were only allowed to have one address? That's essentially the situation with Facebook.

You're free to apply whatever constraints you like to your use of email. An email address is as unstable an identity as you make it.

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stickfigure 5454 days ago
Downvotes? Wow, that's unnecessarily harsh.

Two close friends of mine were the #2 and #4 employees of Friendster. I seriously considered becoming #3. I had a pretty good outsider's view of the early years.

Yeah, they screwed up the scaling pretty badly. But even worse they screwed up the business - after you set up your profile and looked around, there wasn't much more to do (unless you were single and looking). People were already using Friendster as an identity (emailing links as a "you mean this person, right?"). Maybe if they'd opened an API and enabled third-party apps, they could have maintained this position. It's a big "what if" but it can't be dismissed outright.

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