URLs are people too … and service end-points

Interesting morning today. Did a podcast with Brian Oberkirch on trends in ‘07 and what to look for in ‘08 with respect to digital identity, portable social networking and activity streams. While I’m on the call, I get a twitter (see insert) from @dan_mcweeney saying “Why won’t the OpenID guys just add onto their server the ability to ‘friend’ other OpenIDs?” This I get at the same time as seeing a tweet from @kevinmarks talking about URL’s are people too. Moments later I see another tweet from Kevin talking about Scoble and his recent run-in with Facebook. Talk about the perfect storm for data portability.

I said it on Twitter this morning and I’ll say it again:

@jkuramot i still hold that the single most interesting thing about OpenID is that you prove you own a possible service end-point.

Yes, I just blockquoted myself … ha! None of this stuff is going to proliferate because its open, because it has an awesome community, etc. Its the data stupid. If I can prove that I own the URL (and guess what, its actually me and I’m a person) now I can do all sorts of interesting things there. Put my friend list there. My activity stream. My updates. Contact information. You name it. Plug in a little OAuth love and now I can start talking about having sites talk to me when I’m not in front of my browser. Wowzers.

The fact is, data wants to be free. It doesn’t care about Google or Facebook, etc. Users will do interesting things with their data and trying to stop them is like trying to catch a fly with a set of chopsticks. My lord 2008 is going to be fun.

Update: I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.