Dressing In Identity

By | February 7, 2008

The fact that Google, Microsoft, and VeriSign and Yahoo have joined the board of the OpenID  Foundation is a very big deal. It’s definitely a milestone.

Could identity – who we are, what we know, what we’re doing – drive one of the next surges of value creation on the Web? Yes, completely. It could be the great news of 2008.

New startups are going to fall all over themselves to create services around  identity to enrich our use of media, and with the GOOG, MFST, VRSN, YHOO development of an open identity system, some may start this very day.

Privacy, identity’s dark twin, could be a spoiler or it could actually create more innovation.

Meaning if a few of these startups start to figure out how identity and privacy actually work together, so that people feel more protected, more at ease that they can keep to themselves what is truly private, then they’ll also share more of themselves . . . or even begin to create layers of information about themselves.

In other words, they’ll begin to actively identify themselves not just passively. They’ll dress in their identity. It will become fashionable.