My online identity is made of up the data I put on the Web.  My data IS
my online identity.  Every blog post, tweet, and comment I put out into the
Web becomes part of my online identity.  Right now, I only REALLY own the
data in my blog.  This blog, right here, jasonkolb.com, is the only part of
my online identity that I actually own.  *I* own the domain, *I* set the
terms of service, *I* set the license for other people to use the content, and
*I* decide what I want to let out into the wild.  Other than this blog, my
identity is owned by LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other service that I put my
data into.

Identity ownership is about owning versus renting.  Data Portability is
about being able to move your furniture from one place to another when you move,
identity ownership is about being able to tear down walls, put in an inground
pool, and throw wild parties if you feel like it.  Both are important, but
they're not the same thing.

By Michael Marlatt on Jun 20, 2008 | Reply

Nice post-thanks Jim!

If DataPortability is successful, than this will eliminate the obvious issue
of constantly duplicating efforts everytime we want to join a new SNS. As
someone who subscribes to multiple SNS, it’s very frustrating to always create
(yet again) a new profile, add my personal data, then re-invite the same
friends, family, or co-workers, countrymen, etc.! We have definitely hit an era
of Social Network Fatigue.

Thankfully, there is one temporary solution: social network aggregators. For
now, the Social Network Aggregators are a great way to pull all the SNS together
under one roof. I’ve been experimenting with SocialThing, Profilactic,
FriendFeed, Spokeo, as well as Plaxo. All have their ’strengths’ and weaknesses
so I haven’t yet made a firm determination on who I favor. Your thoughts on that
would be appreciated.

As for Open Standards, many people are pretty familiar with the benefits of
RSS, but many others still seem to be scratching their heads around around the
benefits and why they should leverage OpenID, OAuth, OPML, etc. I love OpenID
but it hasn’t worked perfectly across all the major sites that I subscribe to at
the moment-oh well. While, it’s great to have these options, my sense is that
we’re still a ways off before we hit mainstream adoption by both the user and
provider community.

OAuth

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OAuth is an open protocol, initiated by Blaine Cook and Chris Messina, to
allow secure API authentication in a simple
and standard method from desktop and web applications. For consumer developers,
OAuth is a method to publish and interact with protected data. For Service
Provider developers, OAuth gives users access to their data while protecting
their account credentials. The OAuth Core 1.0 final draft was released on October 3, 2007.

History




OAuth began in November 2006, during which Blaine Cook was developing the Twitter OpenID implementation. Together with Chris Messina they
met with David Recordon and Larry Halff to discuss using OpenID with the Twitter
API to delegate authentication. They concluded that there were no open standards for API
access delegation.




The OAuth Discussion group was created, in April 2007,
for the small group of implementers to write the draft proposal for an open
protocol. DeWitt Clinton from Google caught wind of the OAuth project, and
expressed his interest in supporting the effort. In July 2007 the team drafted
an initial specification. Eran Hammer-Lahav came on board and provided a
enormous amount of help coordinating the many OAuth contributions and creating a
more formal specification. On October 3, 2007,
the OAuth Core 1.0 final draft was released.






[edit]
What is OAuth?




OAuth allows the user to grant access to their private resources on one site
(the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer). OAuth is about giving
access to your information without sharing all of your identity.






[edit]
See also



• Microformats
  
• OpenID
  
• DataPortability