Why AOL Should Go OpenID

I've argued before that identity is a building block -- an essential amino acid, if you will -- for social networks.  It's far from the only thing you need, but without stable, persistent, verifiable identity, it's very hard to build relationships.  It's so important that there are specialized subnets in the human brain that recognize voices and human faces to help you remember people.

The digital world doesn't work like that.  Identifying someone online is hard.  Even solving the more limited problem of verifying that this person is the same person who you were socializing with yesterday online is not trivial.  All social software has some mechanism for letting people verify some online identity -- usually a user name and password.  Of course that just means that you have different user names for different services.  In the new "Web 2.0" world, though, a primary rule is for services to be open and interoperate and play together.  That's difficult if people have to remember that you're leetjedi67 on service A and urtha52 on service B.  It's fine if you want to do that, but most people want to be themselves most of the time.  And our infrastructures don't allow for that.

Well, at least they didn't.  There's a remarkable convergence of user centric identity systems happening right now.  At the lightweight end, basically everyone has converged on the OpenID standard.  This lets you be leetjedi.net everywhere if you want.  Or at least everywhere that supports OpenID.  The first, most practical benefit is that you won't need to fill out another registration screen on most new services.  The more long term benefit is that you get to keep your identity and your reputation with you as you move between services.

Of course none of this matters if companies don't adopt it, so what's the benefit for them?  Well, if their service involves a social network, it gains immediate access to both a network and an ecosystem of services which work with it.  The value of a social network grows quadratically with the number of users; the value increases linearly as the difficulty in connecting two users drops.  Connecting two OpenID users with is a lot easier than if you have to convince one or both to acquire a new identity.

This is the big value in promoting and leveraging a common standard.  Even Microsoft is adopting open standards for their CardSpace identity system (and CardSpace and OpenID are talking cordially to each other, by the way).  So embracing the open network, leveraging the quadratic multiplier in network value, and competing on value added services is really the way to go.  Of course this means that you are opening up your own services to more competition as well as cooperation).  Since AOL has already committed to open web services, this is a logical next step.  Just playing around with ideas:  What would happen if every AIM user name were OpenID enabled?  What if you didn't need to even register to use UnCut Video, AIM Pages, or AOL Journals? 

Tags: identity, OpenID, networks, social networks, web2, user centric identity