Gmail as the Universal ID
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.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
ryan scott
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?
Aug 30th, 2007
webprofessor
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.
Aug 31st, 2007
Jeremiah Owyang
The link to Dave Winer points to me. You may want to correct.
Aug 31st, 2007
Henri Weijo
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.
Sep 2nd, 2007
Uno de Waal
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.
Sep 3rd, 2007
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