Web Social Architecture

How Twitter Promotes Quantity to the Detriment of Quality, And Why Twitter Matters Nonetheless

My Twitter experiment was a “successful failure.”

I started an experiment a few weeks ago, basically using Twitter differently than I had previously. Until then, I'd only followed people I know personally--friends, family, colleagues, and professional acquaintances. But a couple weeks ago, I decided to try following everyone who follows me.

This is not a large number of people by Twitter standards (a couple hundred), but I was immediately annoyed with Twitter, and I stopped looking at it for a while. The people I was using Twitter to keep tabs on were simply drowned out by the deluge of incoming tweets, which I found almost entirely uninteresting and not at all useful.

I didn't give up. I created a group in TweetDeck for people I know personally, so I could follow them separately from my full collection of tweeters. That kind of worked on my computer, but it didn’t work on my phone--I never used poor, neglected Twidroid any more. I had to turn off the updates.

I started sort of hating Twitter. What I thought was interesting, though, was people sending me messages thanking me for following them. "You're... uh... welcome...?"

That was what raised the question:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:

The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this tweak would substantially alter the way people use Twitter—for the better. Because the measure of a person would be their ability to consistently create value, people would be encouraged to be more interesting. But notice that the measures I’m suggesting don’t reflect the number of people finding any particular tweet valuable, only the percentage of tweets found interesting by someone. That’s an important difference, because it says you don’t need to play to the crowd—that one-to-one value counts the same as one-to-many value. So you don’t have to be interesting to lots and lots of people, only interesting to a single person.

And there’s more here yet: Because the social capital of the system would be tied to recognition by others, the system would encourage connections that were active, and based on mutual attention and interest. “Capital” here works in the sense of “currency.” We’d pass it back and forth—if I like your tweet, I reward you with a reply, a retweet, or a favorite. My doing so counts for you. You look for an opportunity to reciprocate.

Quality and value, when rewarded, are fundamentally self-reinforcing. So if Twitter supported quality and value, great ideas would be passed along more, reaching more people. Reputation and credibility would flow from meaningful contribution. Relationships grounded in mutual helpfulness would flourish.

Now, as Twitterers like the prolific Nancy White illustrate, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. And it’s certainly better to have more good stuff than it is to have only some good stuff. So a shortcoming of my suggestion is that it doesn’t reward the consistent creation of value over time, or put another way, the creation not only of consistent value but of a LOT of it, consistently.

Batting average only counts beyond a threshold of at-bats. Total home runs matters only relative to years played. If Ichiro goes 4-for-4 in the season opener, he’s batting a thousand, but that doesn’t yet qualify his season for any discussion of the all-time best. So the real answer, if we’re going to get serious about it, is for Twitter to create a quality algorithm and use that as the measure of an individual’s contribution.

Twanalyst is a gesture in the right direction. It’s a service that analyzes Twitter accounts across a number of quality-focused dimensions, resulting in a (sort of cheesy) personality test: I am very pleased to tell you I am a “chatty coherent guru.” Yes!

Kind of fun, but what I actually really like about Twanalyst is that it’s looking primarily at the nature of what you’re doing on Twitter, rather than the amount of it. That, I believe, is the future on an increasingly noisy web.

Speaking of the future, what about Twitter’s future?

At this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that Twitter has passed a… can I say… Twipping point. As Twitter gets huge, and as the purchase offers get bigger, which direction it takes—toward signal or noise—will help determine its fate as a social application.

Will Twitter end up yet another spammy channel, a trivialized feature of a larger social network, under pressure to monetize? Or will it add a valuable layer of ambient awareness to rich, multi-channel online relationships? I’m rooting for the latter, not just because I’m a fan of Twitter (I am), but because I want to live in a digital future where quality, meaning, order, and value trump unwanted noise.

 

But what I’ve said here is also kind of wrong. The story (like stories always are) is more complicated.

Despite all that—despite the shortcomings of a system that rewards meaningless connections, high volumes of worthless posts, and claiming to listen to more people than anyone possibly could—the truth is we can’t ignore Twitter.

And there’s a reason it’s hard to get comfortable with that truth. Twitter, in the midst of its deluge of valueless tweets, also produces a kind of magic: The collective value of all the noise has a tremendous potential to add up to something meaningful—something with a value beyond what any particular contributor can produce. As the Moldova uprising most recently illustrated, and as did the presidential election and Katrina did before it, Twitter, at its best, is a powerful venue for the expression of real-time collective intelligence. And that’s where businesses need to stand up and pay attention.

Mining the Business Value of the Social Web: Behavioral Metadata

As an information architect, I work with metadata a lot. I help define interfaces based on information about the content. For example, an object on a home page might be the "newest" object in a system, or it might be a rotating series of "newest" objects by each "author" with "home page" authority. See my other posts on quality and self-organization in the presentation layer if you want more on that.

I work at a company with a strong focus on performance-driven design, and so I work constantly with web analysts, who specialize in understanding behavior on web sites and using that behavioral data to drive business decisions, and I work constantly with designers, researchers, and information architects whose focus is creating innovative, valuable stuff people want to use.

I'm working where I work partly because I think there's tremendous potential in the intersection of information architecture and web analytics, in particular on the social web.

While some companies have been implementing sophisticated web analytics programs for years, many are just starting to measure behavior on their sites. Very frequently, there's lots of data collected but no real plan for taking action based on it.

At the same time, many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media marketing. They're getting out there and participating, and their customers are creating content, but that content is hard to present meaningfully, and partly because of that most social media marketing efforts fail to realize their full promise.

And naturally, the new focus on measurement and data raises the question of how the success of those social media marketing efforts should be measured. I've posted in the past about measuring communities, and there are a lot of people out there contributing to that discussion. What I think is frequently overlooked, though, is behavioral data helping to create value in social systems. Not data about value, but data creating value.

I made this handy chart to help explain what I mean. Click the image for a more-legible view:

 

When users interact with web sites, information about their behavior accumulates--information attached both to the user as object and content as object. That information about people and the things they do--what's called behavioral or tacit metadata--tells a lot about people and content. And in complex, emergent and self-organizing systems, behavioral metadata is especially powerful, because in those kinds of systems it's a challenge on the one hand to present content in meaningful ways and on the other hand to generate business intelligence to drive smart decisions.

As content and people increasingly cross freely between domains in the emerging standards-based social universe, I think we'll see a shift in business models from today's focus on owning content to a new focus on owning the metadata about the content and the people interacting with the content. I'll risk a prediction: In a short time, behavioral metadata, the information about what people do with content, will be more valuable than the content itself.

What do you think?

Nancy White on Slow Community

Nancy White spoke at ZAAZ last week at our social media event. Her talk, titled Slow Community, was wonderfully ironic coming from the most prolific online participant in THE ENTIRE WORLD. And as usual, Nancy has her finger on an important pulse. Her (she credits others as well) notion of slow community is an exploratory gesture toward solving an emeging crisis in our online lives: social overload, or if you like, information overload 2.0. Ha!

Who doesn't have trouble these days, tracking professional, avocational, personal, and informational relationships across sites, services, and devices? Social network fatigue is here today--and tomorrow promises a truly overwhelming inundation of social and relational input across many channels.

Here's Nancy's 15-minute talk:

Here are the slides:

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Nancy wrote a follow-up post here. There are some great comments on her post--check them out.

For more on Slow Community, start here, then go here.

 

A Sure Sign Facebook Is, In Fact, Taking Over the Whole World, and How You Can Too

I have been putting off joining Facebook. What a Luddite I am! Like everyone else, I've been, over the past several months, getting slowly buried in Facebook invitations from friends and acquaintances who've "gone over." But I already have a dozen Internet homes. I already have a multitude of connections with my people, in a range of communication channels. I haven't felt the need to add another. Today, finally, the last straw arrived.

I received a Facebook invitation from my father.

OK, OK. I'm signing up. Resistance--clearly!--is futile. Not that my dad is technophobic. It's just that, I'll say, he's not an early adopter.

As I went through the signup process, I have to say I was pretty impressed with the add email contacts feature, and I think it probably explains how it came to pass that I got an invite from my father. When you join Facebook, it asks you for your email addresses and passwords, and it logs in to your accounts, scanning your contacts to see who's already using Facebook. It offers you options to "friend" (the best new verb, by the way, since "google") existing Facebook users and invite the rest to join.

The beauty of this approach is that it taps into the existing networks of relationships we formalize in our online address books. By adding a person to our contacts, we effectively say "I know this person." And what a great service, for Facebook to "hear" that declaration and make it importable. We're saved having to manually add contacts, and Facebook takes over the world, spreading itself like a salty joke across the Web's relational architecture.

I can imagine a couple other opportunities to use the same kind of mechanism. What about, for example, our instant messaging contacts? What about the blogs we subscribe to? What about the lists of permitted visitors to our YouTube channels and our Flickr photostreams? Our contacts on social media sites? What about other members of our online communities?

Facebook's contact finder thingie is a great example of a mutually-beneficial service built on an architecture that transcends domain. The network of human relations crosses boundaries of web site ownership, Web service, and platform, but it is, nonetheless, machine-readable.

The Internet is rich with relational architectures. Too rich, in a way--if you were to envision relationship "services" that tapped into all our established contacts and relationships, across all our online identities, the need for some kind of automated classification of contacts becomes pretty clear pretty fast. There's a reason we group contacts, a reason we have different contacts in different places.

Some day I'll blog about a typology of online relationships. Maybe there's a good one out there already--please let me know!

It all makes me wonder: Do you think the old man has my RSS feed? Scary.

The Elements of Social Architecture, Part One: Identity

This is Part One of a three-part series of posts, in which I'll try to capture some of the foundations of the work I do in social media.

There are lots of smart people in this space, and lots of names for Web disciplines closely related to web social architecture. Among my Seattle friends and colleagues, Lee Lefever describes his work as "social design," and Paul Ingram builds social applications under the creatively self-titled umbrella of "inventrepreneurialism." There are many others.

My goal is to put a little finer point on my own discipline than I have up to now. I work in between the nuts-and-bolts code of community platforms and the finished design, in the typical space of an information architect. But I find the traditional ways of talking about information architecture not quite directly applicable when describing what I do. Social web experiences, in my view, are structurally different from broadcast web experiences. So in this series of posts I'll start to list some of the elements of those structures.

I'm sure I'll overlook some, and I hope you'll remind me. And none of what follows supercedes, only complements, traditional IA practices.

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's famous Venn diagram has more or less defined the field of information architecture. There's a lot of debate about it, a lot of refinements done to it, and a lot of criticism of it: It's been the singular touchstone for the large conversation about "What is IA?" Here's a version of it:

 

I'd like to offer my own take on an emerging discipline, which I call web social architecture. I see it as a new subset of information architecture. You might say it's the practice of information architecture applied to participatory experiences. It exists both within and alongside traditional information architecture as it's been practiced on the web. Obviously, this topic is the focus of this blog, and everything on the blog really is about web social architecture as I practice it in my daily work. So here's a different view of the familiar IA diagram:

 

 

Within each of the three foundational elements, there are a number of areas of practice for Web social architecture. Following is a very rough  overview, and by no means an exhaustive inventory.

Identity

Identity: Attributes

I  posted a bit about this idea earlier in the context of personalization, where attributes attached to identity are matched or correlated to attributes attached to content. This approach, called behavioral targeting, is particularly apropos in dynamic web spaces like communities, and it's an important idea blogged about thoughtfully and thoroughly by Anil Batra.

In a nutshell, attributes are the things that are known about a person (as represented by an identity). Those kinds of attributes break down roughly into two groups: explicit attributes (the things I choose to tell you about myself) and implicit attributes (the things you know about me based on my behavior).

The combination of explicit and implicit attributes attached to identity form the basis for personalization and recommendations--but also relationships, groups, and so on.

Identity: Authentication

Authentication is important from a social architecture perspective because it's an important mechanism for establishing thresholds of entry and participation, establishing identity, and managing permissions. The social architect needs to design authentication requirements that provide easy enough access to encourage the required amount of activity while requiring enough commitment to ensure the site isn't flooded with low-quality content.  

Identity: Privileges

At its most basic, privileges (or permissions) means access. Authenticated users are able to access protected data. Users with higher-level privileges are able to perform additional actions, like add, edit, and delete.

In the context of web sociability, the idea of privilege takes on additional dimensions. In addition to privileges conferred by site owners, privileges can be conferred based on collective judgements, by levels of participation, and more.

Privileged community participants can become key communicators within the community, can assist with moderation, and can help broadcast the community's social contract.

Identity: Membership

Membership is, at a basic level, a persistent belonging. Individuals can belong to communities, to groups within communities, to structured events like live chats, and more. I say membership has a degree of persistence meaning the joining act ion creates a state of membership that affects the experience afterward, even temporarily.

Identity: Profile

There are two kinds of profile: public and private. The public profile is the view of a user that's visible to other users. The private profile typically enables a user to provide and edit information shared with the system but not visible to other users, like credit card details or configuration preferences.

There's a lot to say about the public profile. It's an important component of community experiences. Typically, all contributions a user makes provide a link to the public profile, enabling everyone to see who's talking.

The best public profiles include both static content (the things users say about themselves) and dynamic content (the reflection of users' activities in the community). Static content typically includes a bio, photo, and location. Dynamic content typically includes content uploaded, comments made, groups joined, and more.

Dynamic profiles can be a powerful tool to introduce accountability and broadcast reputation (more on reputation later). If the things you do and say stick to you and become, effectively, a part of who you are, you're a bit more likely to think hard about how you behave.

Identity: Favorites

Our favorites are the things we want to be able to re-find easily. There are two most-important mechanisms to enable re-finding: bookmarking and tagging,

Increasingly, favorites are being made public. Sean O'Driscoll wrote about a concept he calls tag drafting. The idea is basically that if you're interested in the same kind of stuff as another person, you can watch what they tag and get connected with their information landscape.

All kinds of favorites can be made publicly visible and aggregated, and the idea is broadly called social bookmarking or social tagging. Del.icio.us is built around this concept, and Microsoft's Tagspace is a powerful advancement. In another twist, Flickr adds favorites to publicly-viewable profiles as a mechanism for discovery and as a descriptor of identity--you can see the photos I like, and they tell you something about me. If you're looking at my profile because we have something in common or you like my photos, there's a decent chance you'll also like some of the photos I like.

Favorites really belong to all three of the social architecture domains, because favorites are typically media objects with which a person chooses to establish a persistent relationship, Media objects we collect become part of who we publicly are, just as the objects in our homes seen by guests shape their sense of us--in that sense favorites are attributes of identity.

Identity: My Content

My content is the stuff I create. In social media settings, my stuff might be my videos or photos, and they might be incorporated as part of my identity through a profile or, as on YouTube and Treemo, a "channel."

My content is also my blog posts, my comments on other people's blogs, my posts to discussions, the discussions I start, the archive of my instant messaging conversations, and so on.

Increasingly, we're seeing "my content" dynamically included in "my profile," and I think that's a great thing.

Identity: Reputation

Stowe Boyd gave a talk where he called reputation "collective intelligence applied to the individual." Not bad. Reputation is another huge topic, and my aim here is to be in overview mode, so I won't go too deep on this, But I will say reputation is especially important in informational contexts where the expertise of a content contributor is critical to understand, such as in a technical discussion or a question and answer forum. Reputation is the visible artifact of authority. It's credibility that can be measured.

 

Identity is one of the great frontiers of the online world, and there are lots of people out there who know more about it than I do. So, what dimensions have I overlooked?

 

See also:

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Two: Relationships (forthcoming)

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Three: Media (forthcoming)

Social Network Marketing: Think Differently about "Placement"

"Social networking" is a term I hear used interchangeably with "online community," "Web 2.0," and, most discouragingly, "viral marketing." In the latest intallment of The Commoncraft Show, Lee has done a nice job clarifying the term for those unfamiliar with it: 

What I like here is that Lee describes social networking in a platform-independent way. Obviously, there are lots of different kinds of web site that could serve as a social network, including blogs, which aren't typically considered social networks. 

Online social networking is a human activity, not a technology type. While there are some very familiar sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Match.com that are typically lumped into a category as "social networking sites," I'm much more inclined to think about social networks in architectural terms. 

From a social architecture perspective, online social networking sites are clusters of linked identity-centric web spaces. While on the one hand, there's no real hard-and-fast line between "social networking" sites like MySpace, which are structured around the individual identities of users, and "social media" sites like YouTube, which are structured primarily around individual pieces of content and secondarily around "channels" (groups of content objects with a common author), on the other hand this difference of emphasis has a huge influence on how these sites are used. 

Most significantly, social networks increasingly cross boundaries between web sites. Behind the power of web services, APIs, widgets, and portable content (like Lee's video above), relationships and content move effortlessly across domains. 

Even more interestingly, social networks are beginning to cross boundaries between our physical and digital lives. Add-on services like Moo's 3rd-party-based business cards herald a new generation of real-world artifacts of our online experience. 

Marketers wanting to tap into "the all-powerful magic of" online social networks need to shift from thinking about (and budgeting for) site based-initiatives and campaigns ("Let's do something on MySpace this fiscal year") and begin viewing social networks as a relational architecture, independent from and superimposed against what I'd call the superficial architecture of mere web sites.

OpenID plus ClaimID: Not Quite Right, Yet

We're approaching a new horizon in identity management on the Web. Adoption of the OpenID platform by Digg, AOL, Microsoft, and others has increased the visibility and viability of identity services like Opinity, Microsoft's Cardspace, and ClaimID.

I've posted before on OpenID, and I've said elsewhere that managing identity is, along with email, one of the two big solvable problems on the Web today.

Today, most people have many online identities. This is a hassle:

 

OpenID and a variety of identity services combine to offer the beginning of a solution. Here's how the Open ID platform and the ClaimID identity service work together:

In a nutshell, OpenID is an authentication protocol enabling you to log on to web sites with a URL that represents you.

 

That URL points to an identity service that displays information about you. Here's a picture of my page on ClaimID. By "claiming" the links on the Web that are by or about me, I can differentiate myself from Ryan Turner the baseball player, Ryan Turner the musician, and Ryan Turner the Kalamazoo, MI felon. In doing so, I also create a single place where people can get a sense of who I am online.

 

So, when I want to participate on a site that supports the OpenID protocol and make my online presence visible to other participants, I can log on using my ClaimID url.

 

This image shows a sort of process flow for logging on to an OpenID-enabled site to leave a comment. I use my ClaimID URL to authenticate (if I'm not logged on to ClaimID, the authenticating site points me back there). Once I'm logged on, the authenticating site recognizes me with identity attributes hosted by ClaimID. If I leave a comment on the site, the site's identity system points back to ClaimID for others to view my profile. If I choose, I can tell ClaimID to point to my blg or another site instead of displayfing my ClaimID page. That's all there is to it.

 

Pretty slick. ClaimID effectively becomes my face to the world, and everywhere I log on using OpenID via ClaimID, the same process works. Instead of having to remember multiple user names and passwords for authentication and manage multiple public profiles, I just use a single identity for everything.

In the picture below, the information about me that I include in my ClaimID profile is broadcast to all the sites where I participate. Neato, right? But wait. What if one of my attributes (the things ClaimID broadcasts about me) is a link to my del.icio.us profile, where I store my saved links? What if among my saved links are a few about a health issue I'm researching? What if my insurance company can see that attribute? Not good.

No, identity, especially online, is contextual, and really really needs to stay that way. I don't want my insirance company to know what health issues I'm researching. I want to be in control of my identity as it's broadcast to the sites where I participate.

The insurance company example is a very serious one, but there are all kinds of common-sense, practical reasons why we need contextual identity. I, for example, partiicipate in the online community world, where I present myself in a certain way, and I also participate in online communities focused on parenting, back-country skiing, etc, where I present myself differently.

 

So a model that makes more sense looks something like this: I have a centralized dashboard where I control which of my attributes are visible on which sites. The ways I present myself, or the aspects of myself I choose to reveal, match the characteristics of the sites I visit.

As far as I know, nothing's missing technologically for this kind of centralized identity management to get built. Maybe someone's already doing it (let me know!).

Looking forward, it's not hard to imagine a dashboard that not only gives people control over which aspects of themselves they make visible where, but also generates site-specific profiles automatically based on metadata attached to the site. Microsoft's Cardspace is a gesture in this direction.

Soon enough, it'll be as effortless to adapt to Web social contexts as it is to untuck your shirt for an after-work beach party.

The Kathy Sierra Incident

If you don't know about the Kathy Sierra death threats incident, read about it. Everyone with a personal presence online should stand up and pay attention.

There has been a huge amount of commentary online about this, and while I feel, because I care about issues of social accountability online, that I should chime in, I don't actually have a lot to add. I do think there's an interesting nuts-and-bolts discussion to be had around building accountability into online social systems, and I'll get to that, but in the meantime I just want to add my 2 cents of support for Ms. Sierra to the other thousands of supportive voices.

However, I will point to one especially thoughtful and thorough post by my colleague Nancy White. Her analysis and summary of the issues and conversation surrounding this incident is friggin' deep. Check it out.

The Basics of Web 2.0 Personalization

I gave a short talk internally the other day on personalization, which is one of the important concepts many of our clients ask about. It was very basic, essentially roughing out a framework for thinking about personalization from an information architecture perspective, and pointing out where some of the Web 2.0 twists are. Here's the cliff notes version:

 

Web 2.0 is made of two important things: people, and content objects. People are represented by identities. Most of us have many. Identities have information attached to them. This picture is of a person. The person has attributes.

 

When a person comes to your web site, you often know a few things about them, like their referring URL, their browser, etc. This isn't much. An early goal for conversion on Web 2.0 sites is account creation. This picture is of a person with a brand-new account. You know their account information, but not much else. The person has many attributes, but you don't know what they are.

 

This is your web site. It's made of content objects, and the content objects have attributes. In Web 2.0, you know what some of the attributes are. Other attributes, like user-generated tags, might not yet be knowable.

 

One of the most basic kinds of personalization is access control. Based on the person's account information, they can access some content objects and not others.

 

As a person uses your web site, you learn more about their attributes. Sometimes they tell you ("subscribe to newsletter") and other times you learn about people by knowing what they do ("I bought Scoble's book about blogging").

 

Different content objects have different attributes. Some, like content type (photo, video, downloadable document, product info) are structured, and others, like title, are unstructured. Some, like tags on a Flickr photo, are added by users.

 

Basic content personalization is a matter of matching up the attributes of a person with the attributes of a content object. You know the person likes basketball because they bought a Duke basketball jersey, so you show them a content object that has to do with March Madness.

 

There is some complexity in the details, I have to say, including reconciling attributes that don't have 1:1 relationships, such as when a person's location is "northwest" and your content is tagged by state.

Anil Batra has taught me a lot recently about using complex behavioral targeting mechanisms to personalize content--for example, if a person on a newspaper site looks at the financial section and the automotive section, you can target them with an ad for a Lexus. New services are emerging that enable you to track behavior across multiple web sites and use that data for personalization. Combine that with advances in identity management, and you're in the brave new world.

And some of the details are fundamentally different on Web 2.0. Content objects are created and assigned attributes by users of your site. User-generated content and folksonomy change the game for personalization. I believe many, many corporate web sites are going to learn these challenges quick--and the folks who get it right first are going to stand to gain a lot.

OpenID and the Participatory Web, and Some (Not So?) Wild Predictions

I've been hearing a lot in the past week about OpenID, the free authentication protocol. And by "a lot," I mean it's been mentioned on a few blogs, including in Lee Lefever's always-useful plain English.

In simple terms, OpenID provides a framework to centralize authentication by associating a person with a unique Internet address. Just as every web site and networked device has a unique address, a person now can too. Using that address, a person can log on to a web site that uses the OpenID protocol by providing their unique address. The web site points the person back to their own address, where they authenticate and are sent back to the site they want to log on to. The benefit here is needing only one set of credentials to log on to many sites.

In addition, OpenID enables people to specify which pieces of their personal information are shared.

Having said that, at least one VP of Engineering of a major community platform has "never heard of it." And there's plenty on the blogosphere about all the unsolved issues with it. Digg, however, has announced it will adopt OpenID--but the truth is, despite Digg's popularity (sic) and power in the social networking world, it remains a niche player on the Web as a whole. Nonetheless, the leading edge seems to be paying attention. And adoption by one major player could create a tipping point.

So, though declarations of a revolution in universal online identity management might be a little premature, it does seem that OpenID opens the door (ahem) to broadly-useful advances in identity management across the Web.

It's no surprise to see something like this emerging. The problem of identity has been getting bigger and broader for several years now, as more people do more stuff online, as personalization has become more important, and as participation has become the norm. Most folks use just a single set of credentials for everything. I sat next to a woman on the airplane recently who keeps a spreadsheet with all her credentials on her PDA. Yikes!

But there's another issue I haven't heard talked-about yet. As Lee describes it:

In more Plain English, it's a standard that enables Internet users to have an online identity (username, photo, profile info, etc.) that is constant for every website to which they belong. OpenID is not owned by anyone and everyone has equal access to it. One password, one login, one identity for each person.

That's putting it pretty clearly, and for me Lee's description highlights exactly where OpenID in and of itself doesn't provide the answer. From my perspective, multiplicity of identities isn't the problem, and creating a single universal identity isn't the solution.

We quite appropriately have many identities online, each suited to its context. I have identities for several personal and professional blogs, for several online communities, and on several platforms. I reveal different information about myself in each. I have relationships with an untold number of online businesses I've interacted with, and these relationships are invisible to each other. They have to be. Paypal, for example, has information about me that I wouldn't prefer to share with the world, and at work I log on to networks with sensitive competitive information. In a backcountry skiing community I have one persona, and in an information architecture community I have another. Rightly so.

 Managing all these identities is the problem. And... widespread adoption of OpenID could be the first really promising step toward solving it.

Here's a picture of what we have today, illustrating some of why we need to have multiple identities:

 

 

And here's a picture of where we may be headed as syndication, portability, and personalization become more ingrained in the Web experience:

 

To realize the notion of a person-centric web, we need tools to centralize and manage identity. Human beings will be a primary object type on the Web, with explicit and behavioral metadata attached as the aggregate result of all Web activity. OpenID will underlie a new class of identity systems that make it easier for people to interact with the Web more securely, with appropriate levels of trust, and with more connection to the things they care about.

Boo-yeah!

But wait. Who controls that metadata? It's tempting to say OpenID provides the architecture to support a democratizing movement toward user control. In truth, I believe ownership of personal metadata will be negotiated as part of usage agreements, because behavioral metadata especially, in the context of e-commerce for example, constitutes competitive advantage for online sellers. Would Amazon share your purchase history with Borders? No, but you might want them to. That negotiation, and the sharing and hiding of personal metadata, will soon become a critical facet of our digital lives.