The Dream of One Online Identity

Gravatar - Globally Recognized AvatarsGravatar is the leading provider of cross-site avatars. I can’t think of a single service that is integrated into more community sites for the visual representation of a user.

If you sign up to the service you can have your picture associated with your email address. Comment on a blog that uses Gravatars, or sign up to any other community that uses them and you can have your avatar show up, allowing a consistency of identity for yourself and a more inviting community for the site owner.

All great and useful, but that is all the service does.

Ideally, it would be a true online identity. The beginnings of this would be easy, just add OpenID support, something they can do, keeping in mind Automattic who owns both Gravatar and WordPress has added OpenID to their WordPress.com service.

Gravatar + OpenID would be a single identity both in authentication and visual sense.

OpenSocial - Google CodeIntegrate with WordPress.com and they could build in a public profile. Add in friend/buddy support and you have a social network, and through open API plugins could be built that extend this network presentation across any site. With Googles latest developments, such as Open Social, they wouldn’t have to even build most of it.

OK, I have picked on Gravatar here. Truthfully, I wish one of the many services I use would take this kind of idea and run with it. Twitter would work, even Flickr (although they do have things to worry about with the off and on Microsoft dealings). Perhaps Google is best place to do this, especially as they will want to make Microsoft investment in Facebook moot.

One issue I guess is portability of your data means you have even less say in where it appears. Privacy issue?

What do you think? A dream, a likely scenario or one step too far? Please add your thoughts in the comments

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Uncategorized

Comments

One Response to “The Dream of One Online Identity”

  1. John on May 20th, 2008 8:29 pm

    While I am not a heavy 2.0 type. I do see how this would be a great service for those that need a strong web presence. Freelancers and Blogers come to mind. I’m sure that its just a matter of time before someone does this.

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