| Good God, man, have you gone looney?
You say the internet is broken because authentication is a pain?
You say there should be just one social network?
Try telling that to the people making boatloads of cash today. The internet IS democracy.
You can't tell it what it should and shouldn't do, or how it should or shouldn't be.
It gets to decide that on its own. The solution is kinda simple.
Don't try to control the internet.
It has never worked, and it will never work. Instead, focus on making OpenID & OAuth easier to implement.
Most sites don't want to manage authentication & account creation.
They would love to farm it out, but right now, it requires a lot of work to do so. Instead, take a cue from Plaxo: focus on making a better Identity & Privacy control service.
Fill it with simple APIs, and let other sites use it.
Make it come complete with lifestream feeds & webhooks.
Find a way to use Facebook mail without logging into Facebook. >>You could have multiple profiles on multiple gateways so that you could have multiple identities if you needed them Doesn't that defeat your entire stated purpose?
Now we're back to 2009: multiple logins on multiple sites. >>either support the construction of this model or to force the startups you found to embrace this model Are you TRYING to break the internet?
You can't force anything!
The internet IS evolution.
The internet IS democracy.
The internet IS freedom.
The internet IS bottom-up, not top-down. This ain't gonna work. Build something.
If it really is better, people will flock to it.
If not, they won't. There is no force, only do. |
I didn't say the Internet is broken because authentication is a pain. I said the Web has been created to deal (and access) hypertexts. Nowadays the WWW is used for much more. People use it to shop, keep contacts with friends living far away, some use it to share their "lives" and the current state of art is far from being functional to the scope. To my personal point of view, it is broken by design when it comes to these scopes. And far from me trying to say there should be just a social network.
The gateway I idealize is not a giant bucket (or a silo) you'd fill with your stuff, that's exactly what I want to avoid. The "gateway" would just be a place you use to authenticate and authorize apps to access subsets of your data. Some of it (anagraphical data for the most part) would be stored on the gateway, and other stuff would be in much more appropiate places. Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, et cetera. The model I idealize would be a common layer to build thing on, nothing more and nothing less.