Identity Crisis 2.0

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

The Boston Globe

It’s the existential question of the Internet age: Who am I on this Web site?

The Internet has come to dominate the way people keep in touch and share information. It also has fractured digital life – turning people into a piecemeal collection of user names, passwords and online personas.

Now, a growing number of efforts aim to fix the problem of online identity, so that photos shared on one Web site, social networks created on another or restaurant reviews written at another are no longer fragmented.

“Our stuff is scattered all over the place – passwords and user names we use to get into all these silos of information,” said Paul Trevithick, chief executive of Parity Inc., a Needham, Mass.-based company working to let people easily transport profile information or their network of connections between Web sites.

“Today, it’s all manual, and if you want to go somewhere and the site wants to learn something about you – guess what? ‘Please create an account, please fill in this form.’”

A burgeoning list of user names and passwords, used for everything from paying an energy bill to logging on to a social network with former classmates to reading a news Web site, has created a modern-day annoyance: an unending digital baptism as each new Web site requires people to coin new nicknames and passwords.

But there are also privacy and security concerns. People continue to deposit information about themselves all across the Internet, often without clear control over that data. People might be unable to easily export the profile they spent hours crafting or take the network of friends they spent months building beyond the walls of a particular Web site. People who invest time in writing reviews on Amazon.com or creating solid reputations on eBay start from scratch if they ever leave those digital walled gardens.

The scale and seriousness of this digital identity conundrum have attracted start-up companies as well as major industry players to the search for solutions.

OpenID, an effort supported by big names such as Microsoft and Yahoo, for instance, is creating a universal log-on. Earlier this year, Yahoo began a public beta offering of the OpenID service, which allows a person to sign in to multiple Web sites with his or her Yahoo name.

Meebo allows people to unify their instant-messaging accounts so that those who would like to chat with friends using other networks, such as AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, can talk across the different platforms.

FriendFeed creates a single feed of the activities of friends scattered all over the Internet.

Plaxo started out trying to improve the digital address books people keep in various places but now lets people specify whether the contacts are friends, colleagues or family – and share a holistic picture of their online life with them – whether they created a play list on an Internet music Web site or uploaded photos or posted a new blog item.

TrustPlus, a Waltham, Mass.-based start-up, attempts to solidify reputation – the track record a person has on Craigslist or eBay, or even on a dating Web site.

All are working at giving online life a better chance at mimicking life in the real world, where people often know their friends through multiple channels.

“Isn’t it annoying – I meet somebody and I have to add them on Facebook, LinkedIn,” said Shawn Broderick, chief executive of TrustPlus.

Those relationships have to be forged anew on Web sites, Broderick said, and if you were to move from one to the other, they still would be stuck in the walled garden where the relationship was created – but a growing number of people believe you should have ownership of them.

Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation, compares the current state of affairs to the early days of the Internet. Initially, people logged on to “walled gardens” through Internet service providers such as AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve. Open e-mail, which allowed people to send messages to people regardless of their provider, was revolutionary, he said, and helped open the Internet.

Now, his hope is that such ideals will begin to chip away at the new walled gardens that ask people to create their digital selves over and over, from scratch. But he acknowledges it might be a struggle, because many Web sites’ value comes, in part, from users who form relationships that they can’t take outside of the walled garden.

“Most Web site operators of any size are only going to go kicking and screaming into this openness – not just that there’s value in the demographic information and in the fact that you’ve established your place in the community, but your loyalty is more assured,” Washburn said.

In a way, the problem has an analogy in the world of telecommunications, where legislation mandated that customers be allowed to take their phone numbers with them to other carriers, saying the numbers belong to the users and not to the phone companies.

The same thing could happen on the Internet, as people assert ownership over things that seem even more basic: biographical information, favorite quotes and pictures. All are created by customers but can be hard to delete or transfer out of Web sites.

In a vision of the Web sketched out by some advocates, users are in control. The connections they forge on one Web site can be taken to multiple Web sites.

That way, for instance, a person’s restaurant review on one Web site could be visible to friends and colleagues, even if they haven’t registered and made connections on that particular site.

“That personal data belongs to the user, not to us – we’re a custodian,” said John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo. “In the next phase of the Web, who you know becomes valuable to you and meaningful and accessible to you across any Web site, application, or device.”