SXSW – Fortune telling with Chris Messina: the future of online identity

I had an interesting discussion with Chris Messina, one of the brains behind the OpenID project. From a user’s point of view this would be the end of all those screen names, usernames and passwords that can get out of hand and difficult to manage. The project would allow you to have one or more unique identities that you could allow websites to look at and use rather than logging in to each one with different details.

He had some fascinating ideas about how the nature of online identity is changing, including people having multiple ‘identities’, ‘personas’ within those identities, and the discussion went off into the realms of security, multiple identities and what they might mean, and on to some more technical stuff that was over my head.

The overall impression is that if you’re developing a site that needs user logins make sure you adopt OpenID.

Watch this video of this conversation on Viddler (sorry about the sound quality). More info by Skiff.