I Gotta Be Me...

I guess year end is the time to “spring clean” one’s virtual identity. Over the past week, I’ve gotten a barrage of emails inviting me to various social networking sites to verify that I know someone, befriend someone else, or simply update my contact information. Plaxo tells me everyone is doing it this time of year so it must be true.

The point is this, while I’m happy to verify, befriend, endorse and vouch, I do resent having to create and maintain multiple online identities. I’m not a teenager who winds away the hours online interacting with the rest of the world via the persona that suits my particular mood at any one time. I have one identity, one brand if you will, and that’s all I want to maintain regardless with whom I’m interacting. Sure, I want a way to segment that identity so my business associates need not concern themselves with what side dish I’m bringing to mom’s for Christmas dinner, but all-in-all, I want one place to manage my online identity.

This problem first became apparent to me back in the day when I would repeatedly enter my address, date of birth, payment credentials and other personal information into almost every website I visited. I thought to myself, shouldn’t the web be the one place where I shouldn’t have to re-key data over and over again? This is why I was a big fan of Microsoft’s Passport (now Windows LiveID) and Hailstorm initiatives. The “one me, one identity” concept was quite appealing. Now we can debate whether Microsoft as a company or their identity management plan was right for the task (I personally have no problem with Microsoft fulfilling this role considering their software drvies my computers, mobile phone and game console), but the bottom line is I shouldn’t have to maintain a different set of credentials everywhere I go. Could you imagine having to maintain a different license for every state you drive through or a different credit card for every store and restaurant you visit?

Now Google is trying to fill the void with Google OpenSocial and Google Profiles. While the information tracked by these services is initially pretty basic, it’s easy to see where this can go. I for one am happy to see this development and hope it happens. Why Google is any less “frightening” now than Microsoft was back in 2001 is a bit beyond me but I guess a lot has happened since then. Be it the acceptance of the software as a service concept, more sophisticated security and fraud detection systems and the explosion of social networking, now might be the right time to finally implement the unified identity concept. Let’s hope so.