Facebook and decentralized identifiers
An interesting commentary on the problem of global identifiers, via Michael Tsai. In a nutshell, global identifiers are for the benefit of the implementer, not the user. For many practical purposes, users care about many fewer people than implementers do, and they’re happy to identify those people idiosyncratically.
[…] this approach uses the social network to manage identity, by reducing the size of the problem space by about seven orders of magnitude. It’s perfectly feasible to keep track of the identity of a few hundred people using familiar attributes like names, faces and personal relationships: humans have been doing it for literally hundreds of thousands of years.
I myself am lukewarm on Facebook, but I’m finding Twitter oddly appealing for one of my jobs, keeping track of what interesting communities exist and where they’re going next. More on that later. (My twitter account.)