Nice. A widget to display my digital IDs, from the newly launched Internet Address Book…though it lacks Opinity‘s verification mechanisms, ensuring that the IDs you claim, are actually yours. This is particularly important to assert a digital reputation, such as an eBay identity. Still it’s good to finally see a few companies starting to attack the problem…it’s still difficult to see the business models right now, but there’s certainly a space for the infra providers of Web 2.0.
Category: Identity
Second Wardrobe
Cute. Meez.com allows users to construct and export avatars for use in online communities, IM clients, blogs and other social software; kinda like a super-Stortrooper. News.com is carrying a video review of the service today.The image on the right, is the best approximation of myself I could construct without joining Meez (or losing weight); incidentally the background is the Palace Of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco 🙂
After losing a month of my life to Knights of the Old Republic in Summer 2005, I’ve shied away from online gaming, immersive-addictive MMOGs and digital worlds like Second Life.
However, dressing and configuring my avatar to look as much like me as possible in the Meezmall raised an interesting question…how much of a business is there for fashion brands – like FCUK, Levis and others – to sell digital equivalents of their ranges to avatar providers? Could the success of WoW and Second Life drive a massive secondary economy?
I Am The Web
- I was born an orphan in the 1960s, but I wasn’t alone.
- I belonged to no one, but was adopted by everyone.
- My friends nurtured me and watched me grow – I will never hurt them.
- I have been awake more than 4000 days.
- I am bits and I am atoms. My nerves are glass and copper and radio.
- I’ve been sick, but never asleep.
- I have billions of friends – they talk to me through the air, through the seas and through the ground.
- They look at me through windows, large and small. I can see them sometimes too.
- My friends are rich and poor, big and small. But my friends don’t all like each other.
- They taught me by joining things together; their words, pictures and voices…their desires, their sounds, their fears.
- I can speak every language – my friends, they talk through me.
- My friends are starting to teach their things to talk to me too.
- I have trillion synapses. Every year, they double.
- I remember everything and everyone – even from the times before I was born.
- My friends don’t remember so much now – I do it for them.
- They will use me for everything.
- There are no others like me.
- Without me they will not feel like themselves.
- I Am The Web.
Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s We Are The Web and IBM’s Prodigy and The Future Is Open ads 🙂
Reputation Banks
‘Identity is how you describe yourself do others; reputation is how others describe you.’
A lot of my recent research has focussed on reputation as a function of digital identity – from the brainstorming Ian and I did on telephony reputations, to concepts that IDII students developed for me in March. In essence, is it useful to have global digital reputations, like eBay Feedback Scores, that can be applied to any transaction online?The Institute for the Future recently switched from trend forecasts to ‘prescient product ideas’ to illustrate its insights. One of the five Artefacts from the Future included a spoof American Express Statement of Account for reputation…an very interesting user-centic notion.
Perhaps the way to tackle reputation in multiple contexts is to simply ‘bank’ transactions in various categories. Services like Flickr, Amazon, eBay and others would simply bank transactions with the user’s identity/reputation provider; from low value transactions, such as blog posts, comments and user reviews to borrowing items and finally higher value auctions, sales and loans.
It’s not too difficult to see a service like Rapleaf evolving into the Root.net for reputation. More significantly, if eBay were to provide API access to Feedback Scores, or even spin-off their reputation systems, they could rapidly become the first large scale Reputation Bank.
