Multiple Personalities Welcome On The Web

Without getting into Freud here, I wanted to discuss the idea of “multiple personalities” and how it is going to affect the way we browse the web, maintain our community profiles and protect our encrypted personal/financial data. Just like Beavis had The Great Cornholio and his TP, Dr. Robert Bruce Banner had The Incredible Hulk and Steve Urkel had Stefan Urquelle; we all share in their strife to promote various characteristics of their personalities through multiple characters. And you’re thinking to yourself, yeah so this is obvious; they’re on tv, movies or comics. Correct. This framework also lends itself to the web and how we segment our own personalities into various silos like business and personal. We have a Myspace page that promotes our personal life outside of work; we wouldn’t want our co-workers knowing we still collected GI Joes at age 45. We also have business profiles on LinkedIn that promote how much of an expert and well connected we are in our various industries. Then there’s the middle. If you are an early adopter of the web, you have quite a few profiles setup in Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Twitter, Dogster, LastFM, Technorati, Netvibes and so on. What each of these community and bookmarking websites offer is the ability to be anonymous in a niche category. You can truly become a giant in each one, because not only do you have passion for that interest, but the communities are small. Big Fish, Small Pond metaphor anyone? Well as more of these sites enter the online market there comes an issue with multiple usernames, passwords and ids. It is going to come full circle, users want easy, quick experiences and fast access to their info. Just look at the airports. Who wants to wait in that long line to be prolonged by a gate person searching for their information, tagging their bags and handing them their boarding pass? Pull up to the curb, check-in, and head to your gate. Or head inside, use the quick check-in terminal, print out your boarding pass and head to your gate. It’s all about easy access. Enter OpenID.
OpenID promotes the decentralized management of your digital identity. It’s in its infantile stage, but it had laid the groundwork for something innovative on the web. With Microsoft and AOL adopting OpenID, it’s only a matter of time before many more websites integrate this technology into their future releases. So if you’re wondering how OpenID and Identity 2.0 is going to affect your user experience online, check out these great resources and stay tuned for more.

Digital Identity Resources
Identity 2.0
Identity 2.0 Solutions
Sxipper
Identity 2.0 on Wikipedia
OpenID
Open ID Enabled
MyOpenID
Microsoft and OpenID
AOL and OpenID

In order to validate the emergence of this theory see the Google Trends charts below. You can see how OpenID has gained a bit of momentum in the last few months as web 2.0 continues to rise and shine. The adoption of this will of course happen more quickly in certain regions as shown in the bottom chart. Your most innovative regions in this web 2.0 space continue to be San Francisco, London and Tokyo. Hmm, wonder if we can get San Diego in there?