Both Jeremiah and Dave Winer have proposed that Facebook could potentially become the universal ID system on the web, as opposed to the open source OpenID system, which is being adopted very slowly. When I just came across this new feature on twitter that enabled me to search my gmail inbox for contacts that might be twittering, and consequently found 130+ people, I thought maybe Gmail could become the universal ID. The good thing about Gmail contacts is they are automatically generated based on who you email, which is great for someone like me who is pretty bad at maintaining lists of anything, including contacts. I was also thinking that Spock.com might become quite a widely used system as well, especially as people have to sign up for an account to edit their identity there.
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I think everyone’s a little leery of a universal ID – that’s a very heavy monopoly position if it truly catches on. That said it would benefit all us users greatly. Can you imagine how much wasted time humanity spends re-entering login information, and even more with filling out registration forms?
Are you crazy? This is a terrible idea. After spending 15 years trying to teach people not to share their passwords we want to teach them that its ok to do that now.
The link to Dave Winer points to me. You may want to correct.
Well as it stands now Facebook isn’t really an option, I mean they don’t have autologin unless you do some creative coding. I don’t think people would stand for logging in to Facebook first, then logging into the other services they use. And to boot, Facebook doesn’t allow simultaneous logins from different browsers (I use Firefox and Safari together for different purposess). Plus I don’t quite trust Facebook and their use of their own, closed database formats.
So yeah, sign me up for the Gmail as the universal ID.
Well, it’s not that much different if you use Gmail as opposed to a normal login/pass.
What you are talking about is importing a list of addresses and not actually checking whether the people are signed-up or not. People also sometimes use different addresses for different services.
E-mail is a good system for mailing someone, but not really as an identity.
Trust a company that cooperates with enforcement agent, offers backdoors into personal information to any old third parties, and forces the user to to comply with facebook codes. Now there is a progressive idea for the age of information.
Anybody thought about what it would mean to create a new kind of domain used for individuals instead of organizations? Something that isn’t arbitrary but requires the copy of a birth certificate to register for? This sort of thing could replace social security numbers as a new universal ID number and could be used to tie private information to individuals across state boundaries.
If such a system would have to be controlled by the highest levels of security in much the same way that SSN related information is or even better.