Mike English's blog

As Joseph, David, and Chris were all traveling this week, TheSocialWeb.tv posted video from Le Web as this week’s episode.

Dave Morin does an excellent job highlighting the value of Facebook‘s social graph data. – Real names, real friends, etc. as I pointed out the other day.

But I also think Michael Arrington raises an interesting point when he says that Facebook is not actually interested in being open. He goes on to say that “open” doesn’t always win, but is actually what the weaker competitors do when they band together to compete. I agree that it may not be in Facebook’s best interest to adopt the standards of the open stack at this point, but is openness really a sign of weakness? Or could it be rather a sign of strength when a social network adopts an open attitude – a sign of confidence in their network, and the commitment of their users to the community that their network provides? Is Facebook worried that being more “open” will degrade the value of the social graph data they’ve hoarded? Are things like Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and OpenSocial enough to force Facebook to adopt standards like OpenID and OAuth?

Much as I generally dislike the MySpace community, I’m really excited by Max Engel‘s enthusiasm about the open stack. If MySpace continues with its commitment to “open” ideas, a lot of users stand to benefit.

The biggest problem for “open” as I see it, is not having a place to control your identity that is both independent and centralized. A lot of sites are implementing bits and pieces of the open stack, but as far as I’ve seen, only a few of the large existing networks are trying to implement the whole thing. If I’m going to connect the dots between my accounts across the web and tie them all to one source for my profile information, I don’t want that source to be under someone else’s control. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be the definitive ‘me’ on the web, and I definitely don’t want it to be my MySpace page. I’m glad that we’re starting to have more freedom to choose, with a growing list of OpenID providers and all, but I still don’t see a comprehensive solution that works for me. I want complete independent and centralized control of my identity.

I’ve made some slight modifications, and now I have Sixjumps‘ Facebook Connect plugin up and running on Mike English dot Net. Come check it out.

This means that you can now comment using OpenID, or by logging in through Facebook Connect. I’m all about giving you options. (If someone wants to try linking an OpenID to their profile after logging in with FB Connect, let me know. I’m curious to see how that works.)

(please be patient as I continue to tweak things – remember that this blog is a work in progress.)

What does identity mean online?

In the past, the most important moniker for online identity was your e-mail address. This is changing.  Identity is increasingly being defined not by e-mail address, but by URL. It doesn’t matter anymore where your mailbox is, but what property you actually inhabit on the web.

If you can prove you control a URL, then you have an identity you can use across the web. OpenID is the new definitive standard for exactly this. It’s a sort of handshake for verifying ownership of these online properties.

If you hadn’t already noticed, this blog is OpenID enabled. That means that anyone with an OpenID can easily leave a comment, automatically including whatever identifying information they’ve set their provider to pass along. It also means that I can use this blog as an OpenID. When the Internet asks, “Who are you?” I can respond, “I’m http://mikeenglish.net/blog/, nice to make your acquaintance.” – only, is that best representation of who I am?

A URL provides two forms of information, first, the semantic information that may or may not exist in the URL itself, and second, the content available at the URL. Populating and configuring this blog will constitute the second half of that information, but what about the first part, what does it mean to be http://mikeenglish.net/blog/?

Why not just http://mikeenglish.net? In fact, I’ve already starting using http://mikeenglish.net as an OpenID. It’s simple and straightforward. Right now visiting that URL brings you a page with my name on it. I recently made it a hyperlink, and it links to this blog.

Why didn’t I install wordpress to the root of the domain, why does this blog live at /blog? Maybe it’s because I’m not sure what this will become, I’m not sure I’m ready to be so directly identified with something that’s still experimental, something that’s still evolving and growing. And yet, providing a home for my online identity is exactly why I’ve created this blog. Perhaps then, the relegating of this content to /blog should be taken as a gesture that the development of my online identity is still in early beta.