Identity architecture

Google Plus‘s real name policy has made it clear that they aim to be not just a social network but the leading identity provider for online activity.

Facebook’s Timeline can, I think, be interpreted as a similar move. As others have said it provides a structure that’s something like the personal webpages of 10 years ago gone interactive – a central place for the definition of “me” to be constructed, curated and broadcast. Again there’s a real name policy, although rather less vigorously enforced.

But this talk of their aims to become the leading identity question begs the question, how is identity provided online now, already? The answer (suggested the boy a couple of days ago) is email. In a world containing Jesse Owens (Olympic sprinter) and Jay Owens (blues musician), if you want to find me on social networks you can’t search my name, you need to search my email address. You have your email address on business cards – Twitter handle too, perhaps, but 140-char has to redirect to longer-form channels somewhere along the lines. What’s your log-in for most websites you use? It’s either an email address directly, or a username set up from reference to an email address.

And the cornerstone of this liberty is free, web-based email. Hotmail. Gmail, until recently. Mail.ru and Gmx.us and so on and so forth. This has not always been the case – email started out connected to your ISP (and thus subscriber details and physical address). Google are trying to take it back there.

So just something to bear in mind in the great squall of online identity debates. Free anonymous web-based email is not cool, or glamorous, and it’s easy to see how it could be threatened through recourse to anti-spammer rhetoric and Gmail perhaps one day privileging emails from real-name-certified accounts…

…But it’s something very important to defend.