Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling.This is important to think about for anyone that makes things on the internet. About 10 days ago I started making a list of all the sites I log into. I’ve logged 47 sites. I access the majority of these sites with a username and password. This is not optimal, and I look forward to the future where the concept of identity is made stronger, where the user owns their identity, and where we can create new things based on this strengthened sense of who is who.
This also raises huge issues of online privacy… ie. much of the concern over services like facebook connect. Traditionally identity does not fallow you around on the web and a lot of folks like it this way. It will be a hard balance to strike between personal convenience and privacy
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