Your portadentity is your identity, portable across web services. You probably haven’t heard the term before, because it just occurred to me, and Googling it yields no hits. The concept may well be familiar, since it has received a lot of coverage in the last month or so. A recent example comes from yesterday’s Financial Times.
It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.
Another statement of the problem is the Smashcut video. It provides part of an argument for “data portability.” I don’t find that term very useful, but suspect that we are stuck with it, and regard it as a price worth paying for the achievements of the Data Portability Working Group (DPW).
At the heart of data portability is your identity. The DPW, consistent with its policy of using existing standards, uses OpenID for digital identity. Your OpenID, together with the data attached to it, is what I’d call your portadentity.
Today’s big news about the DPW is that Microsoft has joined. Read/Write Marshall reacts as follows. Microsoft’s joining the group is an event of sufficiently complex historical meaning that I’m hesitant to try and interpret it here. I won’t try to interpret it either.
I’m more inclined to spend my interpreting energies on Matt’s statement yesterday about Automattic’s vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more. I added the emphasis on identity.
Here’s what I hope Automattic will do about portadentity… all right, data portability.
- Appoint someone to the DPW.
- Make WordPress.com a consumer of OpenIDs. It’s currently a producer only.
- Make it clear where Gravatars might fit in to all this.
I have an uneasy sense that they’re planning on making Gravatar an alternative to OpenID rather than an adjunct to it. We’ll see.
I hope that you are wrong.
I don’t see why it would make sense for Automattic. If I as a user go with OpenID, I might link my OpenID to a wordpress.com uri. If I go with gravatar, my identity is an email address, which has little to do with WordPress.
It would also be swimming against a standards-based tide, which would take more than $30M of muscle to pull off.