jr conlin's ink stained banana

Ok, so your choices are:
Facebook, Yahoo, Google, some acceptable form of OpenID, or hundreds of thousands of sites.

Really, that's what it breaks down to.

What am i talking about? Ah, sorry, getting ahead of myself. i'm talking about your online personage.

Allow me to back up a bit. Ok, not really a bit. More like a helluva lot. All the way to 2001 when Microsoft had the brilliant idea of creating a global account you can use to log in wherever. Stunning genius, that. Well, except the part about Microsoft not being exactly well loved or really all that benevolent, and privacy advocates waking in pools of their own sweat screaming from the potential security nightmares. Still, having one universal account was a bloody brilliant idea.

This lead to some equally brilliant folks starting OpenID, which radically decentralized who could own your ID. Now it wasn't one central pillar of questionable morals, it was hundreds of thousands of sites all offering to be that one true broker, and it's up to other thousands of sites to determine if said broker was legit' enough for them to accept. (Usually the answer to that was "no", meaning you were kind of back to square one.) In addition, you've got the Big Guys (AOL, Yahoo, Google) all rolling out their own ways to be the One True Source for Your Information because they realized what an incredible marketing boon it would be to broker that kind of info.

Granted, they had their lunch eaten by a sprightly upstart named Facebook, who not only realized what a marketing boon it would be, but came up with a simple method to do it while everyone else was bickering in various conference rooms.

So that's where things stand. Of course, there's another issue at hand, which is that handling accounts is a pain in the patootie. If my business is about anything other than selling the marketing preferences of the people under my thumb, (e.g. i run a subscription based service, or a general publication site catering to a certain enthusiast audience), i really don't want to deal with messages from Bob who forgot his password… again. This means that having some other site happily step up and deal with the Bob's of the world is just Jim-friggin-dandy as far as i'm concerned, which means that the days where you can log in to that site are on the decline.

This isn't a bad thing. Tonight, while "registering" Anne Marie's ebook reader, we wound up entering in the same damn information five times. As a customer, having a central site contain that crap means that in a potential future i can say: "Hey, Sony, you deal with that crap". Of course, that statement should send a few cold shivers down your spine. More so when i tell you that one of the things you can do with Facebook is crawl your friends details and info, like their registered email address. And you thought Plaxo sending out spam notes to everyone in your address book was bad.

Fortunately, none of this is settled quite yet, but it will be. My bet is that Facebook probably wins that particular battle since the OpenStack portion hasn't gelled, and while Google FriendConnect is nice, it's more about getting Google Crap on your page than you getting any sort of joy out of the system.

So, who's going to own you?