Doc Searls on User Centric ID

William Heath passes on some sensible thoughts from Doc Searls on user centric identity.

"T1 identities are both timeless & unconditional. They are your true personal digital identity and are owned and controlled entirely by you, for your sole benefit...

Tier 2 is Assigned (Corporate): one given to you by some silo. Every card in our wallets, other than our business cards, are these.

Tier 3 is Abstracted (Marketing) and applies to those conditions where some company knows, say, your name and address, but nothing besides that, which doesn't stop them from spamming you with junk mail...

In the absence of providing and communicating the immediate and tangible benefits of user-centrism, we'll continue getting the kind of reaction my wife has had from the beginning of my sojourn into this space: "I don't want more identity. I want less." Less, that is, of what she gets on the Web today, which is the same MSO (Multiple Sign On) hell everybody else experiences.

The one adjective that appeals to her, out of all we've been using to describe the user-centric identity experience, is independence...

I know we need to talk about identity agents and solutions and providers and relying parties and assertions and tokens and certificates and the rest of what it will take to build out the first customer-centric marketplaces in the history of the industrialized world, but...

We have to keep the empowering real-world experiences we wish to support in mind.

And, frankly, we don't have those yet. Worse, customers can barely imagine them. Hence, there is no demand for them. Yet.

So we need some demo-sells here."