3pointD.com

One of the oft-overlooked issues that’s going to crop up more and more as the 3pointD world evolves is that of identity. Who are you, in various online contexts, and how can you secure and protect — or make public — the various features of those various identities? There’s no one good solution at the moment, but a number people — including Microsoft and host of others — are working on solutions they hope will become standards, or at least plug into the identity protocol layer that’s being discussed as a necessary addition to the Internet. The subject is too vast to cover in a single blog post, but for more information, you may want to think about showing up to the “grassroots” Internet Identity Workshop being held May 1-3 at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.

I first noticed the workshop in this post on Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog. Kim’s bio is here. He’s the author of the Laws of Identity and the guy at Microsoft who’s responsible for the Identity Metasystem, Microsoft’s proposal for building an identity layer for the Internet. But there are many independent, interdependent and competing solutions either already in use or being proposed — and which I’ll try to feature as news comes up.

In the meantime, I encourage readers to think about identity in the age of virtual worlds and the 3D Web. Besides creating online identities that are secure from phishing schemes and prying government eyes, many VW residents will be interested in systems that allow them to create persistent anonymous identities as well — in other words, to be able to assure someone that Avatar X is linked to a single person, without revealing who that person is. On top of that, you might want to create persistent anonymous associations between your identities in more than one context — e.g., between a Second Life avatar and one in World of Warcraft, or between a World of Warcraft avatar and an eBay identity. Being able to create such identities and associations will do much to smooth the development of commerce across virtual worlds. Watch for more.