B. Mann Consulting

Hey Mark Pincus, I agree with you ("that there is a need for a portable reputation system that can enable non-ebay p2p transactions"). You didn't link to anything by Auren Hoffman who is working on this, so I thought I would point people to ClipperZ -- they are combining Identity 2.0 (using existing systems) and building distributed reputation managers on top of that.

And of course, "transactions" is a very general term. Identity is to figure out that you're talking about the same person, profile information gives you some contextual information about that person, and reputation lets you know (again, in context -- relating to you and your connections) whether you should trust that person.

Mark goes on to say:

My own experience has been that its a major uphill battle convincing walled garden sites that benefit in the short term from lockin to act in the long term interest of their users.

This is the sticking point. Many of the large "containers" of identity, profile, and reputation information do not have much of an incentive to open their networks. The one thing that might challenge such silos is the rise of large amounts of federated networks. Even here, when the network is small, it is difficult to convince people to federate -- who will be the hub or aggregator of the network? Everyone will want to be in this central position, and we are back to hubs facing off against each other.

Identity-related happenings are definitely chugging along. The next Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) is something I probably need to go to (upcoming.org).

IIW is being put together by Kaliya, Doc, and Phil. I'm looking forward to doing things the open space way with my pal Kaliya. I'll have to think about what I might present. I need to spend some more time with the Clipper Z guys...maybe I can represent some of the things we talked about (distributed reputation management) when I was in Bologna on their behalf (unless they're coming, of course...).

An aside: I saw the announcement via Doc, and realized that somewhere along the way Phil Windley's excellent blog had gotten lost from my aggregator. I'm all caught up now, and realize that he's done a couple of posts that I've had rolling around in my head for a while: Google authentication (especially in regards to Joga) and the simple explanation of MicroID. It's great when you can just point to things like that and say "yes, that's pretty much what I was thinking, only written down in a clear and elegant way". Suffice it to say, Phil's back in the aggregator, and I'm looking forward to spending some time around him and other smart folks at IIW.

It was my great pleasure to meet the three guys from ClipperZ (The image is a little blurry, but that's because I had them shout "Identity 2.0" when I took the picture :P).

We sat down for several hours to discuss Identity 2.0 and some of their thoughts on blog owner centric vs. comment maker centric systems, talking mainly about SXORE (Marco has a post with SXORE feedback) and coComment. No comments from the SXORE team on that post, although Bryan Rieger found it. Go Vancouver people!

In any case, they are thinking about portable reputation (or maybe federated reputation would be a better phrase) as an initial application that can be built on top of Identity 2.0 systems. A reputation manager (a reputation provider? store?) would support multiple identity systems for authentication, and also share reputation with other reputation managers. This would initially be based on some very simple metrics, like perhaps whether or not a comment was approved, but certainly could support multiple other values (which gets quickly into a discussion about designing karma systems, perhaps, although it would depend on the feedback loops involved). Definitely subscribe to their blog if you want to keep up with what these guys are up to.

The other exciting thing I found was that here was a new "Web 2.0" style startup company based in Italy that had a lot more in common with Vancouver or San Francisco than anything else I had seen up to that point in Italy. We discussed the difficulties and benefits of a distributed team (although they are all in Italy, they live in different towns), and the usual roundup of tools -- they tried Basecamp but ended up using Trac, their user interaction diagrams are in OmniGraffle, we discussed Campfire vs. Skype bookmarked chats, or perhaps a Jabber multi-user chatroom.

It's nice to see such interesting things happening in Europe, and I have more of an interest in cross-pollination with European companies and clients than I do in jumping down into the scrum in Silicon Valley. I'm already scheming what the next European event will be: perhaps a BarCamp Brussels? Could be organized around Euro OSCON 2006 at the end of September 2006 (the Call for Participation deadline is March 6th).

Lorenzo Viscanti left a comment on my coComment post pointing out that they are trying to build a "a comment rating system based on identity20" over at ClipperZ. I wandered over and found out two things 1) they are running Drupal and 2) they're based in Italy. #2 is interesting because I'm sitting in the Vancouver airport right now, waiting to get on the plane to Torino, Italy. You can find out more about our Olympic journeys over at 2010.dailyvancouver.com. I'm also going to be in Bologna visiting my sister -- Lorenzo, Marco, Giulio, send me an email with your contact info and perhaps we can discuss.

But the creation of multiple reputation/identity/etc. stores is quickly going to become a problem akin to the multiple IM systems we have to deal with today: what if all these rating and comment systems use different, incompatible identity stores? We're back to the same problem of no single sign on, and no single view of our comments, rating, etc.

So this is a call to action. We have to work together to federate and cooperate. A particular identity protocol is not the area where value will accumulate: user experience, privacy rules, and other applications built around identity is what is valuable. Like I've said about social networks in the past, identity is a feature, not a business model. ClipperZ, coComment, what about it? Become, for example, SXIP homesites, and work together on educating the market about the value of identity. Heck, maybe SXIP can stop work on SXORE and just help you with federation and identity store issues.