identity

Phil Wolff of Skype Journal contacted me (over Skype, of course!) earlier in the week to ask about posting something for Skype's 5 year anniversary. I didn't get to it earlier in the week, but when I was chatting with him I had some ideas around Skype and the identity space that I've continued to think about. So, here is a belated birthday wish to Skype. Check out Dan York's post for a lot of the same items that I'll be mentioning here.

I was really annoyed with Skype when it launched. Annoyed because I had spent the previous 5 years working in the VoIP standards space at Nortel, having seen MEGACO and MGCP fall by the wayside so that my favourite, SIP, could reign supreme. And here was Skype, with its proprietary protocol. That just worked. And nary a cool SIP service to be seen (other than the Gizmo Project, which is still the only cool SIP project around...).

I wouldn't say that Skype is an integral part of my work flow today (lots of people use it much more heavily than I for all of their voice communications). But it is one of the communications channels that I do need to have open most of the time, primarily for group IM chats. 3 years ago at Gnomedex, we started a Skype backchannel group chat, and it's still running today -- the "Vancouver Swarm". For various groups and companies, multi user chats are just an add to channel and bookmark away. Oh, and of course, the way that chat history "flows" to you if you've been offline for a while: persistent chat!

And I'm still not talking about the audio and video features :P

My dad is a heavy user of Skype, especially Skype Video. Whether it's sitting down and "sharing" a coffee with my sister in Italy, checking in with relatives in Germany, or showing off the snow up at the cabin at Deka Lake, he uses Skype all the time. He continues to "evangelize" Skype to people he comes across.

I started by mentioning the concept of Skype and identity. With sites like Twitter and other social networks and services exploding into general consciousness and discussion, I'm (still) thinking about identity.

Each of these services are an identity space. Systems like Facebook are rooted in your real identity -- you use your actual name and such -- while others like Twitter have you using nicknames or shortened forms. These nicknames become your identity within those spaces. Phil Windley talks a bit about this namespace federation -- in response to Craig Burton ho humming it. Yes, there is a friction with federating so that a single namespace is very valuable.

Are phone numbers, especially international phone numbers, a single or federated namespace?

In the past, our phone number was a large part of our identity. e.g. my parents have had the same home phone number for 29 years. I still remember the last 4 digits of my childhood friend's phone number (the whole island has the same 6 beginning ones, so the "local" identity space only needed the last four...). Now, less so, in part defensively. I give out my Vonage VoIP number which rings all the numbers I need it to. Of course, when I then switch to text messaging, my cell number shows up (and shows up as "unknown" for those that know me by my home number). Traveling between countries and switching SIM cards, you have multiple numbers.

Skype is a portable voice identity. It doesn't care what country you are in or what SIM card you happen to have inserted. It is Internet voice. One could argue that federation and open standards are needed (and I would agree ...), but no one else has reached the same "just works" level of functionality. Here's hoping that we get at least another 5 years of innovation and disruption out of the Skype juggernaut. Happy birthday!

It doesn't seem that long ago, but the first Barcamp Amsterdam was way back in October 2005, where RalphM and I first schemed about Jabber World Domination. But in reality, a lot of time has passed -- Jabber is now called XMPP, there have been many more Barcamps outside of the US (yes, Amsterdam was first! picture from Ton's Flickr pictures), and we've got a ton of interesting identity and social software standards / formats / tools to start integrating.

Ralph did a workshop on Federated Social Networks at the beginning of December, which I unfortunately wasn't able to attend on short notice. Now Ralph has set the date for a follow up event to be held along with Barcamp Amsterdam III on March 1st and 2nd.

I will, unfortunately, once again be missing the event, since Drupalcon Boston 2008 will be happening at the same time. I'm hoping that some co-conspirators on a couple of projects will be able to attend (I'm looking at you and you).

I suspect the technology stack that will be discussed includes DiSo, OpenID, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OAuth, so anyone interested in those items and how they relate to social networks should plan to attend. Note: although I have a reputation as a handwaver supreme, this will most likely be a down and dirty technology, specs, and implementation discussion at its core, so pack your developers and throw them into the capable hands of RalphM.

So, we now have Google's answer to Facebook's closed development platform: OpenSocial (link goes live Thursday).

Google has a good selection of launch partners for this -- Ning, LinkedIn (an API?! finally!), and Plaxo being the most interesting ones. RockYou and Slide are Facebook development companies that are also signed on, so we'll definitely see some launch apps, not just bare APIs.

This is, of course, very encouraging and similar to the short discussion I lead at the Facebook Developer Garage: integrate with systems other than Facebook, use open standards, and put your stuff out on the open web. Marc Canter has a gleeful post about all of this, including linking back to standards and experiments that have already been underway. Be interesting to see how OpenID Attribute Exchange, which I have long been a fan of, fits into all this.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that there was already a Drupal module ready to go -- here's the project page. Except, it's just a placeholder for now :P But, nonetheless, this is an obvious set of APIs for Drupal to support and participate in this open web.

Will it work? Well, we've got a whole other set of mashups and connections to be making. This code is brand new, and developers, designers, and business owners are going to have to spend time kicking the tires and just trying stuff. Just like Facebook and the Facebook platform has been a new thing which has seen an explosion of creativity and experimentation, I expect we'll see the same thing around these open APIs. It's going to be a fun ride...

Scott Kveton does a bit of a round up of what some folks are working on a technical level with portable social networking, in and around OpenID and some loose markup.

He takes what, in my opinion, is a bit of a cut against Attribute Exchange:

Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so.

Sorry, Scott, when you use phrases like "hacked up", I take issue. Frankly, I would never have gotten on board with OpenID if I didn't see AX on the horizon as the logical conclusion of the SREG stop gap.

AX is an extensible system that will be able to pass many different kinds of information back and forth between systems. It has the same decoupled nature that OpenID has. Different sites can loosely couple by doing nothing more than using the same keys to define different sets of attributes. Why, exactly, would one NOT use this? In theory, one could do something as simple as host an agreed upon list of attributes -- based on FOAF, XFN, or for that matter any one of them in their own namespaces or with mapping between them.

I mean, we implemented syncing of user profiles using Drupal's simple distributed authentication + FOAF *3 years ago*. Working with SXIP in their various protocol incarnations, DIX, and finally the merging into OpenID and AX has all been part of the process of consensus around standards.

Attribute Exchange is a flexible, extensible base on which to implement many use cases around data exchange for user profiles and related information. Any solution around portable social networking should use this at its base, and the OpenID community should move to finalize the extension and move forward to building cool sh*t on top of it.

At some point I got a ping from someone that was working on a SAML implementation for Drupal. Unfortunately, that was a year ago or more, and trawling my email doesn't seem to surface anything.

So, anyone out there in blog land working on a SAML *SP* (aka client) implementation for Drupal? I have some folks that would like to test interop. Please contact me if you've got something.

Related to this is the Google Apps Authentication module, which lets you use your Drupal database as an authentication source for Google Apps -- the for pay, Enterprise or Education edition. This is a SAML v2.0 IdP implementation as far as I know...

And yes, I'm still a huge OpenID fan. But combining the two standards is even better, since theoretically you could create new Drupal accounts via OpenID, and the Drupal accounts in turn would serve as auth for Google Apps. AKA how to use OpenID with Google :P