In Context

Here’s the press release from Eclipse. We’ve been getting lots of congratulations from friends. Which feels great. Thanks to all of you.

The next trick will be building awareness and adoption. When you consider that 0% of all websites (or enterprise apps) accept i-cards or OpenID, and 0% of sites issue cards, it’s small wonder that 0% of users today even know what an identity selector is. We’ve got our work cut out for us!

Being eternally optimistic, I think it is only a matter of time before we people start using identity selectors to:

• log in to websites (instead of remembering passwords)
• manage their relationships with friends (instead of being captive to any one social network or tool)
• manage their relationships with vendors (instead of being “managed” by the vendors — CRM)
• manage their relationships with government agencies and healthcare providers
• fill in forms automatically (instead of being asked for the 18,446th time “First name:______”)
• share preferences, interests and passion for causes and brands
• discover like-minded people…

Oh, and do all of this across the web, across silos, and out from under Facebook’s terms of service!

I think people will come to understand that they have rights in their own identity information. They’ll even eventually see that most advertising “flow” can be reversed because their own preferences, needs, affiliations, history and interests are worth gold to brands, merchants and service providers.

…back to work. 1.0.1 beckons!

[Related blog links: Ian Skerrett, Nishant Kaushik, Mike Jones, Pam Dingle]