Friday, January 19, 2007

On Presented Personality

With Personality I mean the set of information that a user presents, or has made available, to a web site. For blogs, and many other web sites, it is not so important who the visitor is (identity), but what she is like (personality). The work done in the Liberty Alliance ID-WSF suite of standards make it possible for web sites to get such sets of information, while simultaneously the user/visitor is in control over the information that is actually presented, if any.

All of this works still better if it doesn't require too much infrastructure, and that is possible when browsers , or client software, would be able to present the personal information. This as then the user can be given very efficient and easy to use controls. The Liberty ID-WSF specs were designed to enable this and Nokia did several demos of this technology, together with partners such as AOL, Vodaphone and Trustgenix (now HP). Newer Nokia phones, based on Series 60 v3.0, actually have an ID-WSF stack, that makes it possible, and fairly easy, to buld dedicated ID-WSF clients. But as far as I know it is not yet integrated with the browser and does not yet allow for the phone to be an ID-WSF server (of information).
InfoCard/CardSpace is a somewhat similar idea from Microsoft.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.