Mingle Until Departure

Reading this post got me to thinking - why not take this a step further. Why not think about it in terms of developing user-centric tagging not as a standalone application but as one expression, one feature, of an entire user-centric online identity.

Earlier, I had been reading this post about social networking sites [and also recommend the May 15 New Yorker article on Mark Zuckerberg - which, btw is still not online. New Yorker: I luvs ya, but get your act together; when you write an excellent profile of the progenitor of one of the more interesting Internet phenomenons in the last few years, put it up online, and quick. I promise - you can sell ad space even - that the page views will make it well worth your while.] and it brought back some of the thoughts I had when Friendster came out - I adopted early and, despite the frustration with the site, developed an extensive network/online persona there. I also do have a MySpace, Orkut and Facebook account, but those are significantly less-developed networks (for a variety of reasons; my co-hort for the most part graduated college well before Facebook). And there's (some) overlap of network connections on those, but it's always been frustrating to me the repetitive/redundant work of doing what is, really, the same thing several times over. And for what? Resolving e-mail, IM contacts; same. And when I do blogging, or other online writing projects - same thing.

All this work and capital and ME is stranded out there, somewhere.

So - claimID is definitely a logical step towards staking a central pivot to what's already out there, and that's good. I think, though, that going forward it might be useful to think of these systems not as individual components but as modules to the unitary online experience: e-mail, IM, blogging, commenting, tagging, social networking are all of a piece.

The hard part, of course, is getting a whole lotta people to agree on a single standard that would then be interoperable across a whole range of sites/features/modules, and getting people cool with the idea that the primary owner and mover of the information is not the site owner/developer but the user, who can with little or no sacrifice move their usage elsewhere if the features are better. As Fred points out in the first-linked post, right now both user and site owner/developer lose value if the user leaves; making it easier for a user to leave with the value of the site experience (e.g., their tags) intact would, I think, actually also end up benefitting the sites. Because an easily portable and interoperable user identity could then be plugged right back in - with no wasted effort on either side - to a site if it became better (i.e., added/gained features that were a proximate cause for the user leaving in the first place).

More later.