PeopleTagging? Pondering Identity in 3pointD
Here’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head lately: PeopleTagging. It grows out of the question of who I am online. Am I my Web site? Am I my email address? My toon name? My password? Or am I the person sitting at the keyboard, and if so, how do you translate that into various online contexts?
PeopleTagging first, deep techno-philosophical questions to follow. PeopleTagging presumes a world in which we all have easy access to wireless RFID- and GSM-enabled devices (if we want them). It would also be helped along by an app like Wayfinder, a 3D digital earth for Java-enabled mobile phones that should be in beta as of May 2 (according to Ogle Earth), or Google Maps Mobile, a 2D version of the same idea. The basic concept is that you’d use your computer or your mobile device to search for someone within a network of friends or some other community, click on their name, and have your browser zoom in to their location anywhere in the world. Maybe you can then open a communication link to them — voice, IM, SMS, whatever — or, if they happen to be cruising around Second Life or There.com at the moment, would let you drill down further to find them within that world and even launch the application so you could meet up with them there.
Services like Dodgeball already let you do something like this locally and in text, but I’d love to see something that was global, graphic and virtual world-enabled. I pondered this the other day while looking in Google Earth at a few of the places I used to live. I wanted to find the house of an old friend in California, but I didn’t know where he lived. So I thought, What if I could just type his name into the search box and the app would zoom into either his house or his current location, depending on the preferences he’d set? How cool would that be?
This is a service you’d definitely want to be able to opt out of or turn off, but I think it could create some very powerful connections for those who cared to use it. Some interesting things could be done with the broader concept of PeopleTagging itself. What if you could join a community of Second Life users, or of Google Earth developers, or Eve Online players, just by tagging your profile with one of those keywords? Wherever you went, you’d be able to locate like-minded citizens of the world, or find them in whatever virtual world you were cruising at the moment. It’s an admittedly rough concept, but I think it offers some interesting possibilities.
PeopleTagging quickly gets into the realm of identity. What you’d essentially be doing is creating an online profile that could be used to connect you to other people in a variety of online contexts. Depending on how much information you wanted to share with which groups, you might need several different profiles — for example, you might have one for Eve Online, not connected to your RL details, and one for everything else. The ability to tag other people’s profiles could also open up interesting possibilities.
I think this comes to my mind now because, with the profileration of social software sites, we’re beginning to move away from the current model, in which our presence online is primarily connected to and defined by a URL or email address. Increasingly, at sites such as MySpace and in other social networks, we’re representing ourselves as ourselves. In the future — and not too far off, I’d wager — our online presence will take the form of some kind of simple “identity entity,” if you will, a set of data that defines a particular profile. I may move around to different Web sites as “Mark Wallace” when I’m blogging, or I may move between various virtual worlds as “Walker Spaight” for some other purpose. But behind each of those identities is a single data set that will stand in for “me” in my travels.
At the moment, we don’t have a good definition of what that data set will look like. We use email addresses and passwords to log into eCommerce sites, toon names and passwords to log into virtual worlds, email addresses and URLs to comment on blogs, other identifiers to go other places. A lot of people have been trying to solve this problem recently. The most high-profile effort is the Identity Metasystem being developed by Kim Cameron at Microsoft, but there are many more as well.
The issues at play are very subtle. How do I define “me” in an online context? (How do I define “me” in an offline context, for that matter?) Is it enough for me to describe myself to you, or do I need a third party to vouch for the fact that I am who I say I am? How do I create an identity online that’s secure and persistent (i.e., you always know it’s the same person), but that’s not also linked to my offline identity? Is it possible to create a single solution that will do all of these things? Or do we need something more akin to an identity protocol layer for the Internet (which is what the Identity Metasystem approaches)?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I find them fascinating. How do you define yourself online? Are you your password? Or are you something more?
Feeds
Back in 2004, I pondered this sort of thing concerning Web 1.0: “What we need is a simple file format for commonly-used slots such as Bio, Avatar, Interests, etc. Preferrably some kind of human-readable text file that could either be generated by filling out a form or by hand.” [LINK]
I think this is sort of related to what you’re on about here, and I’ll suggest to you what was suggested to me at the time– check out FOAF [LINK], not because it precisely addresses the situations you’ve rasised, but because it was a pretty good method of creating a decentralized, non-proprietary, identity — including keywords for interests. It’s also extensible (AFAIK), so you could overlay a system of avatar names and locations. I think what you’re describing is a FOAF 3pointD.
I have taken a “low-tech” approach to this by simply having a central site for my main identity, which contains a page that allows for two-way identity verification.
For example, the page has a link saying “I have this username on Wikipedia, which is confirmed by my profile there”. My profile on Wikipedia says “I have a page on site X that confirms that I am this person”. Thus, as long as people know the central site, and that is never compromised, and I maintain the page, anyone who knows the central site will be able to check that this is the same person on Wikipedia, Livejournal, discussion board Z, whatever.
But that identity is not connected to the one I use on SL, and here. I don’t want it to be, specifically because there are people who would harass me on SL because of it. I think only one active SL resident knows the connection, and maybe a few other people whom I have told in passing. The wider your identity spreads, the more it can be used against you, until it becomes similar to giving out RL details.
The ability to connect to people through location information seems a good, more-or-less inevitable, idea. Especially the non-discrimination between real location on this planet, and virtual location in MMPRPGs is an intruiging one…on the Identity issue, this presentation about identity2.0 seems to capture most of your thoughts: http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/
June 6, 2006. Coming soon!
I’m interested in this idea for tagging media. When looking at a photograph, generally you want to know who when where. When is easy, and geotagging is starting to be used to cover where, but we need an id for an individual so we can cover the who, living and dead. For my family photo archive, I generate an id based on name and birth date, which is good enough for one family, but that obviously wouldn’t work for the entire planet.