talking web X.0

whereas in part I of this article I have concentrated some historical development and the conclusions we can draw from the learning curve of the online advertising industry, in part II I would like to talk about the technics that are already there and which just must be used on a broader basis.

The most importent conclusion from part I is, that we need something like a user centric identity, if we want to achieve something like “user centric advertising”. To get there, we have to overcome several obstacles on the way:

1. Every person has many facettes of personality - some public, some private, some only visible for close friends or family. For sure noone wants to have all of his personal profile data public on the web.
2. We need ways to identify persons across different websites, even if they use different profiles on each site.
3. The user must feel comfortable about the use of his personal data. He must be in control and his data must be stored in a secure way.
4. To use something like a “user centric identity” the user must see clear benefits.

So which approaches do we see today? The biggest ones are OpenID and Microsoft CardSpace. Whereas OpenID is an open source movement, trying to get rid of having to remember a different login for every account you have on the web, CardSpace is more into secure identification. OpenID sees itself as a single sign on system in the first place and is no identification system at all. A user is free to have as many OpenIdentitys as he wants, and it is not really planned to use these OpenIDs in secure invironments like ecommerce e.g.

CardSpace has much more focus on security and is clearly build for purposes as online payment and ecommerce.

But why not combine both techniques? What you get is a secure access to a single sign on system that gives you complete control over your personal data you would like to share with every website.

The next logical step is to combine the data that is stored in all those great web 2.0 accounts that you access with your OpenID to your own convenience in one single and save place. That way you keep track of all the comments on your blogs, flickr photos, del.icio.us tags etc. without any effort.

A nice side effect ist that you can choose what to publish to the public from that aggregated data. That way you have a dynamic personal profile page without any extra work, but with a lot of options for generating machine readable formats like microformats, foaf files and other rdf-formats.

Ok, so what we have so far is a human and simultanously machine readable personal profile page for the public, an aggregated web 2.0 account overview and administration tool for the user himself and also a single sign on system which makes life easier.

From here on it gets absolutely interesting for the marketing guys among us, but that´s the topic for part III of this article .