Marc Canter’s Law #1 has been published.
Canter’s Law #1:
– It is not a bad thing to make everyone happy. It sometimes requires compromises, but at the end of the day – by getting around the format Wars – we all benefit.
– So though we understand that having too many formats may confuse or muddy the waters – it won’t be muddy to the constituents of each format. Most developers will adhere to ONE philosophy and the others – will appreciate support for all.
– See Flickr
No human cares about what format is supported. Only us. Flickr proved that they could be completely format agnostic and provide a compelling experience to all.
Phil’s take on it...
– To make someone happy, you’ve got to support their format. To make everyone happy, you’ve got to support everyone’s formats.
– There are always going to be more formats than you want. Get over it.
All of this is very conciliatory to ‘technologist’s and their preferred file schema’s and file formats. I have no idea what the difference is between ATOM and RSS and RDF and I don’t really care they all work in my Aggreagator in basically the same way.
I am not sure if Marc is referring to ‘making everyone happy’ in the identity space but I believe that he is based on past comments and the assertion that GoingOn will use all the protocols. (DataTao also says they will support them all too)
In Identity land are not just dealing with file formats. We are dealing with user-centric identity. Let me spell it out for you E N D U S E R S and user experience.
You may support in your identity hub all the formats… XRI – i-names | SXIP – guppies | LID – Personal URL | OpenID URL | {how these two fathom that end users will start to login using a URL after inserting some ‘key’ in the back of their blog/site is beyond me}Passel e-mail of choice and on and on…….
Do you not think all this choice confuses END USERS to the point they will not adopt anything until there is one simple easy to understand way this user centric interop identity system works? Remember some of the folks using this system in the not to distant future will be functionally illiterate.
I basically agree with bob’s point.
But, if you focus too much on making some geek happy, the result will NOT be the “Right Thing” from the users’ point of view. Making one or two geeks happy is not the Right Thing if it means compromising on how well users’ needs are addressed. There are many more users than there are geeks. We need to be driven by a drive to service our users’ needs — not by the egos of geeks and coders.
Mary Hodder had this to say about the identity standards discernment and why it was SO key we figure it out inside our community before ‘going live’ and asking sites and users to adopt.
When I tell people about the identity systems being built, they look at me (sort of horrified) like they have absolutely no intention of ever using such a thing, and so i explain the benefits: single sign on, user control over how far the info goes, not having to give an email address in order to sign up for one or another services, which may reveal more info than you want to, and trust and reputation. At that point they are skeptical, but they usually say that if the single sign-on thing were fixed, and if they had total control over where their information went and how far, they ‘might’ use it.
So I mentioned this to the developer of the system I was testing, and he said that he was using his own protocol.. because ‘everyone else was doing it.’ When I asked why, he said ‘because I want to win’ which i really found very disturbing. He said the other protocol makers were all doing the same thing: ‘wanting to win’ and creating systems based upon their own protocols, so that users would not be able to take their identities from one place to the next.
To me this entirely defeats the purpose of the identity gang, and will be incredibly frustrating to users. More so that email, a personal digital identity representation will be a very personal and emotional thing for users, if it is usable all over and they see it as something that represents themselves because they use it to represent themselves. If not, users will say, what is the difference? Why change to an ID based system (insert ID protocol here: sxip, openID, iName, lid, etc) when it can only be used at one company, or with one set of services. It’s the same thing we have now as far as user’s experiences are concerned, with multiple sign ons.
I think competing based on different protocols is ridiculous and will not help anyone, least of all users. And with users frustrated, you will not get adoption that will really make ID service based businesses take off.
I think people will blog about these multiple proprietary protocols, saying that people should hold off or not play, until this gets worked out and the people developing systems create a single protocol that is open and freely movable.
I’m concerned about using our time constructively in the identity gang to create this single protocol so that we are then competing over services and interesting systems. Are we all on the same page here.. or is this developer right that we are all making different protocols (sort of in secret) to compete at that level?
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