Posts Tagged ‘openid’

HEIs Get Facebook Fever (again)

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

LandRun.jpegFacebook rolled out its ‘usernames‘ function today. This is a new feature at Facebook which allows a user to claim their little bit of the Facebook namespace, along the lines of:

http://www.facebook.com/[preferred_name]/

The process started at 05:00 am UK local time – on a Saturday morning – yet several people in my social and professional networks got up early to claim their personalised Facebook URL. Not all were successful despite this determination, and some ended up having to settle for some variation on their preferred username.

As for me, I enjoyed a rare lie-in :-)

So, why do people think this is important – and worth getting up at 05:00 for? And why am I not ‘bovvered’? From the various commentaries I’ve seen so far – blog posts and Twitter discussion primarily, here are some aspects & motives I’ve identified so far, and some of the issues I have with them.

Fear of someone else registering your preferred username

This seems to be the main reason for the 05:00 land-grab. The motivation for registering a username appears to be, primarily, a defensive one. I guess there’s a sense that this might become important. The majority of people, from my very limited straw-poll, seem to fall into this category. While I don’t personally feel the need, I understand this reasoning.

Wanting to be able to offer a neat & personalised Facebook URL for you or your organisation

This is covered by Brian Kelly – he describes the decision to register a Facebook URL for an organisational Facebook page as a ‘no-brainer’, and lists a few higher-education institutions (HEIs) which have rushed to register a URL.

In his post, Brian asks:

So tell me, what is the logic in having a personal or institutional Facebook account and keeping the long form for its address? Or are the tweets I’ve been seeing simply a minority view from the ideological purists….?

For some people, the personalised URL is immediately important as they intend to use it as a personal ‘identifier’. The motivations here are convenience – such a URL can be much more memorable, and ‘vanity’ – a personalised URL is undoubtedly more satisfying and attractive. (Note, I use the term ‘vanity’ here as it has been used by others in this context and I don’t intend any pejorative sense that this term might convey).

So, why was I lounging in bed rather than rushing to claim my Facebook ID, and why would I hesitate (’ideological purity’ aside!) before registering and publicising a URL for my HEI?

  1. I have a personal namespace, having registered the domain ‘paulwalk.net’. This is also my OpenID, through the use of delegation (I have already changed OpenID identity provider twice without changing my OpenID). I realise that maintaining a personal domain is not yet a mainstream activity – yet I’m frequently surprised by the fact that many of those generally very tech-savvy people in my professional/social networks do not bother to do this, instead investing a major part of their online identities with companies such as wordpress.com or Facebook.
  2. Do you trust Facebook? How much? Because, by registering a Facebook URL and publicising it, you just tied a potentially major part of your online identity with the fortunes and behaviour of this company. As an individual, this risk might be worth the convenience perhaps. But as an HEI – why would you want to introduce this risk when you already own and manage your own namespace?
  3. As an HEI, you will have, no doubt, invested considerably in establishing a strong URL-based online brand, being careful with search engine optimisation and the like. Why then would you introduce a competing URL which will tend to dilute your primary Web address’s prominence? It may be that some HEIs have, after careful deliberation, decided to base their online identity and the marketing of their organisation on the Facebook platform – but I’d be amazed if this were true. So what exactly is the point in establishing a public Facebook URL for your organisation?

An expectation that Facebook will become an OpenID identity provider in the future

More tech-savvy users recognise that the Facebook URL they claim could soon become an OpenID. If they are a regular user of Facebook, this could offer a measure of convenience in the sense that their identity provider will be also a service provider which they use frequently. But as the usability issues with OpenID (and there are several) are gradually ironed out, we can expect to see OpenID’s importance as an ‘identifying system’ rather than an authenticating mechanism come to the fore. Using Facebook (or any equivalent service provider) as an identity provider will make less and less sense.

Time will tell

It may be that I am wrong about these issues. However, I have challenged the HEI sector’s desire to jump on the Facebook bandwagon in the past, and I have not seen much evidence to convince me that Facebook is a significant platform for engagment with students. As part of a marketing strategy, it probably makes sense to maintain some sort of presence in Facebook – just as it might make sense to establish a presence in various other systems. But on the public Web, an HEI’s identity must surely be kept independent of any private commercial concern. The mechanisms for ensuring this are well established. And, increasingly, we can begin to apply these mechanisms to our individual identities.



Tags: ,
Posted in Social Software, Web Infrastructure | 9 Comments »

OpenID and name authority

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

In his Science in the Open blog Cameron Neylon has written an interesting post, A Specialist OpenID Service to Provide Unique Researcher IDs? in which he asks:

Good citation practice lies at the core of good science. The value of research data is not so much in the data itself but its context, its connection with other data and ideas. How then is it that we have no way of citing a person?

Cameron suggests that OpenID might offer a solution to this.

I have been very interested in OpenID for some time. I like the relatively agile way in the which the standard has evolved. I like the fact that it has been responsive to the developer community. I agree with Andy Powell when he talks about the importance of the capacity for the delegation of the service providing your OpenID – I’ve maintained an OpenID for myself at http://paulwalk.net despite having changed the underlying OpenID identity provider service twice. However, I’ve become frustrated by the way in which OpenID has been deployed and couched almost entirely in terms of it’s potential to solve the often-exaggerated problem of users needing to maintain too many user accounts (although I confess that I have contributed to this). Personally I maintain a small handful of username/password combinations for accessing hundreds of web services – it’s a minor inconvenience. And as Mike Ellis pointed out in a great post, OpenID: fail:

In a technical sense, OpenID works. But from a usability perspective, it’s absolutely horrible.

I blogged about OpenID a while ago, saying:

I’ve thought for a while that the introduction of URIs for people was the often overlooked yet potentially most interesting aspect of OpenID. In a resource-oriented-architecture, it would seem plausible to suppose that a reliable pointer to a representation of a person would be a useful thing. But when I try to sketch out a useful application for this, I struggle….

The idea of using OpenID as an ‘author identifier’ in scholarly communications has occurred to me before too – specifically in the context of repositories. I agree it could play a part here. At one level this could be seen as an extension of the ongoing persistent identifier issue in the context of web-resources, being applied to people. However, as an OpenID is a URL, it is open to the same criticisms levelled against the use of URLs for papers in an institutional repository for instance (the delegation feature does mitigate this, albeit only slightly).

One aspect of OpenID, which I think might become relevant if OpenID reaches any kind of critical mass as a public identifier system will be the way in which a given OpenID could gain authority over time. The only thing you can trust about a newly minted OpenID is that you can interrogate the ‘user’ of the OpenID and verify that they are the agent which ‘controls’ or ‘owns’ it. However, an OpenID will rarely be surfaced without other metadata about the agent – there will be a context in which it is used. In a community of researchers for example, as a particular OpenID is used more and more by a researcher in various contexts and systems, a level of trust will build around the association of that OpenID with an actual person.

For a long while I thought that OpenID might be the answer to a problem arising out of the need for a different user-account in every system we use – not the bogus issue of needing to remember lots of passwords, but the fact that this creates an immediate obstacle to joining up those systems at the level of the user. This issue has become more visible with the systems underpinning social networks. I see all kinds of potential in being able to conclude that while I might not know the person identified here in this system, I can be sure that they are the same person in this other system, because they have the same OpenID. Of course there is all kinds of potential for abuse of such join-up, but I would still like to be able to control such arrangements myself.

Increasingly, I’m annoyed by my social-web activities being constrained unnecessarily by really prosaic limitations in the systems I use. As I said in another post back in September 2007:

Now, it’s certainly not unusual to maintain more than one, unconnected circle of contacts. Many people prefer to keep their professional and their social networks separate. But, and this is the important point, I really don’t want my social networks to be constrained by particular software choices. As I can connect resources across the web in a uniform way to form a network of resources, I want to be able to connect people to form my social network. Perhaps OpenID or something similar could provide the solution.

Imagine a Web where everything you did publicly was linked by the very fact that you were represented by a URL exactly like your blog post, or your photo on Flickr, or your post on Twitter, or your correction to that Wikipedia entry, or your research paper in your institutional repository for that matter…. think of the possibilities.

Tags: ,
Posted in Programmable Web, Social Software, Web Infrastructure | 8 Comments »