When I first posted this issue, my main objective was to provoke the
notion that if Wave is going to be a modern email and IM facility,
that it should address identity management in better way than every
system currently. Identity is not just about what I use to login. It
is also about how other users see and address me. Users shouldn't
have to update their address books every time I want to change a
provider for my account. I didn't change my identity, I only changed
providers.
The DNS approach is probably the most all encompassing solution.
However, the monopoly of the registry is a significant problem with
that approach.
An alternative approach would be to support an identifier proxy. This
would be a user id at a provider that is only used to reference my
actual provider account. All that would be required by the system is
a flag that indicates it is a proxy and does the dereferencing. This
does not solve the entire global identity problem, because if I ever
want to change my identity provider, I will disrupt users address
books. But an identity proxy could also have a flag that indicated a
stale address, and contained a forward to the users new identity
address, so that as users use the old identity proxy they would be
alerted to change to the new one. Basically a change of address
flag. This approach is not very disruptive, as it still supports the
current provider identity model, but augments it with identity
providers (ie. users wouldn't have to use an identity proxy). By
enabling the separation of account providers from identity providers,
it encourages users to leverage the best providers and encourages
competition and innovation amonst providers. A minimal amount of
support in Wave itself would be needed to make the identity
dereferencing transparent. Then you could have identity providers
that used all kinds of strategies for identifiers from phone number to
whatever.
Vince
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