FORD: Schizophrenic Addressing – You are (no longer) I

by Carl Ford

Sometimes you have to love acronyms. For example, Universal Resource Identifiers are a great concept.  The discussion of URI's at the IETF made me feel old and antiquated.  Here I was advocating my phone number and ENUM, when the hip young industry Internet types were all about the web.

Well, as often happens, everything that is old is new again.

It turns out that when you use a URI like your email account, you spread the identity around to several systems that use it to keep your state.  The problem is that these systems codify your identity. And what happens if, as is often the case in a declining economy, the email you thought was permanent is no longer connected to you?

For those who think OpenID did the trick, I just want to say it helped.  It made it so that my invalid ID was now more universally known, and I used it often enough that an email to my old (no longer valid) email address was not necessary.  However, did you notice I have a bad email address out there in the open for the world to ID me with?  Hmmmn.

Interestingly enough the old Plaxo would be very handy right now in these trying times.  While I sing their praises for having sold themselves to Comcast, and creating Pulse, I wish the old system was a place for innovation as well.

I have my own ideas about these issues.

My CardScan and my IRIS business card readers are constantly asking me to update the duplicates, which unfortunately does not ask the right source.

A good friend of mine two weeks ago handed me four business cards, all current and all valid.  Funny thing was.  They all had the same cell phone number.

So am I vindicated?   Are cellular numbers better than email ids?

As the world now converses on the web with multiple identifiers that have pseudo email-like Walls, groups, IM clients and other URIs may be universal but are less likely to be unique.

I think we can safely assume that single sign-on dreams are not a real issue for the millennial generation.

I also think they accept the phone numbers being behind the scenes.  Like Verizon's commercial, "I am texting my BFF Jill," not contacting her number.

So how do we manage all this, or do we accept the chaos?

Personally, I am a security nightmare.  I have three passwords I use which are adaptations of the same thing.  And while I think of myself as a problem, I think that my banks using the same pass code on the web that they have for my bankcard is probably a lot worse.

I would love to see a key chain strategy that was stronger than my history on the web and my access to something no longer valid for me.  Maybe I should accept the chaos.  Then again, maybe my bell head is too skewed to the TPC vision in The President's Analyst.