3pointD.com

Pete Cashmore’s excellent Mashable has featured a couple of interesting sites in the last few days that are moving closer to the kind of identity-building tools I’ve been thinking about lately, including the identity-information aggregator I Twitter-predicted for epredator: OtherEgo and YouGetIt let you aggregate your social networking-style identities on a single page. MobileOX is looking to do the same thing. While this isn’t a revolutionary idea (all three services sound like a home-page builder with easy plugin tools), it’s significant that the process of collecting your disparate content and identity information in one place is becoming easier. A technology that’s been around for a while only begins to have a broad impact once it becomes broadly adopted, obviously, and these are just the kind of tools that could lead in that direction.

Mashable also has a post on TapeFailure, which records visits to your site and plays them back in more or less video form, complete with statistics about things like how far the mouse was moved, so you can actually observe how people are navigating around your site. I’d love to see a version of this where I can record my own browsing sessions that way, instead of giving the information to the browsee. And speaking of lifelogging of browsing sessions, I need to go and install Slife 1.0.

Lastly (for now, since there’s clearly more of this stuff on the way), there’s Weblin, which “lets you create a web avatar that travels with you on your web journey” and allows you to chat with other Weblins when you bump into them on a given site. Nice, and kind of like Me.dium or Gabbly. Me.dium puts a chat sidebar in your Firefox browser where you can chat with people who are on the same page, or follow them around the Web. Gabbly puts a chat window over any site that lets you chat with other Gabblers who are browsing it at the moment. See it at work on 3pointD.

Most of this feels like temporary steps in the right direction to me. It’s hard to tell how it will all shake out, though. There are still a lot of questions to be answered about identity management on the Web (not to be confused with identification, which I see as a different though closely related issue). Will we continue to have to store all the aspects of our online identity in different places? For that matter, will we continue to store all this content remotely, or will we return to a more local storage scheme out of privacy concerns? And will one of these single-page “portals to us” emerge as a standard, or will something else sit at the center of them all? Interesting stuff like that. I look forward to seeing more early attempts at answers bubble up out of the froth.