Chris Poole (4chan, canv.as) spoke about identity at the Web 2.0 Summit going on right now in San Francisco. Many point to his talk as the most impactful and thought-provoking.
Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want to think about what the world would be like if we did it right.
Having different accounts for different purposes, and allowing users to choose their own vanity identifier just seems like common sense!
Sounds so simple but the implementation is so hard to get right. Remember the “alias” feature at Yahoo?