This post is copied and pasted. It started life as a response to an email from Ronan asking for my take on a New Scientist article on the creation of passports to transfer avatars from one online world (like Second Life) to another.
Seems to be representative of the upcoming (or current?) shift fromcentralised social hubs to open standards for social interaction. Thisis why I keep saying Facebook should sell. It’s going to be dead in ayear or two if it keeps the current walled garden design. The walledgarden didn’t work for Adam and Steve and it’s not going to work hereeither.
We’re not going to have a single repository of friends lists andpersonal details which we laboriously migrate from one old and bustedservice to the new hotness every six months. The next round will beopen protocols that let you describe your relationships once and usethat in any service that supports it, whether that’s photo sharing,music recommendations, event invitations or whatever.
It all starts with OpenID for decentralised identity verification,which is already gaining traction. Every AOL subscriber already has anOpenID, whether they know it or not. So does every Live Journal user.How long before Yahoo!, Google, and MSN follow suit? Conservatively, Ipredict that by the end of next year there’ll be at least oneuniversity, probably in America, that assigns students an OpenID alongwith their email address.
It only makes sense that the virtual worlds would follow the samepath, and for the same reasons.
I do not know what’s up with the Dutch.