February 22, 2008
I know this may seem odd for a web developer to say, but I don't get all the
worry about the future of the Web. Seriously, why worry so much about it? Do a
quick Google for "the future of the Web." Now take it all in -- semantic web!
browser wars! web standards! file sharing! My two personal favorites
among the page titles in the search results are:
- Is XAML the future of the web?
- Yahoo!: The Web's Future Is Not In Search
The first one makes me just snicker, and the second one makes me feel a
little sad for Yahoo. Actually, the second one illustrates a good point, too.
Worry about the future of the Web too much, and you can miss it's present.
February 7, 2008
I attended Zero Linden's
office
hours today, and there was a very interesting discussion about identity
in Second Life. Maybe it's better to say
there was a large discussion about a whole host of things related to virtual world
interoperability, which began (and continued to loop back to) talks about identity. I'm not
trying to be too wordy with my description here, but really, everyone returned to identity
as if that was the central issue of the discussion -- and in some ways, I can
see that it was -- but it other ways, there was a lot being discussed and
certain areas being lumped together with others. I
would like to go over some of the things that came up today, just to clarify
my own thinking on these things, and also to separate out issue into distinct
domains. So let's look at authentication, identity, and data portability
all of which came up today.
Authentication
Authentication and identity were lumped together pretty heavily today,
especially when we got around to talking about
OpenID. The two are tied together in a system,
there's no doubt, but to equate one with the other is inaccurate.
Authentication is the act of securing permission for an identity, but not
the identity itself. Usually, this means giving a token (a cookie on the web)
to someone, or something more accurately, to allow that agent to act on behalf
of a given identity. Or to act as that identity. But authenticating
an identity is not the same thing as presenting the identity, or describing the
identity. (And this point will make more sense down the page, I hope.)
I get the confusion or the conflagration of the two, especially where
OpenID is concerned. OpenID even defines itself as "a place to store your
digital identity." While this may be the goal of OpenID, that's not how it's
used today. OpenID is used in authentication as a means of matching an
end user, or an end user's computer, with an online identity. OpenID is not
the identity itself.
Don't believe me? I can log into ma.gnolia
with an OpenID of my choosing. I am known as
deryck on ma.gnolia. Most people
would identify me by that profile link. That is more closely my identity
than the OpenID. In fact, I can drop the current OpenID I have with ma.gnolia,
authenticate another one, and now I have a new means by which to authenticate.
OpenID is just authentication, at least at this point in the game. It is just
the means by which one system is matched with another (the me sitting, typing
at this computer with the virtual me stored on a server). The authentication system
is wholly separate from my identity itself.
Identity
So what is identity?
This is a great philosophical question, and really
was the question at the heart of our discussion at Zero's office today. How
we answer that question -- i.e. who am I? -- is a tough one. Clearly with
social networks, or web sites more generally even, and with virtual worlds
like Second Life, we invest a lot of time in carefully crafting an identity.
For Second Life, the identity and login name are synonymous, but for other
systems this might not be true. See the OpenID discussion above, or how we
can use an email for login at ma.gnolia or
Facebook. So our identity is that
which projects ourself through the system. In Second Life, this is very
"physical" in nature, even if a virtual physicality. We have a body, a shape,
wear certain clothes, call ourselves by a certain name, where certain group
tags. All of these things taken together identify us.
In some ways, we are the things we collect virtually. In SL,
these are virtual things, like real life stuff. On ma.gnolia, the things
I present to represent myself are the few bits of data I write about myself on
the profile and my collection of links. Take a look at my top tags, and you'll
learn a bit about me. These things are not really me, so we'll leave that
really large discussion behind, but they do -- when taken together --
identify me, at least on the given system.
Which brings us to....
Data Portability
If I could take a few basic things with me from web site to web site,
or a few basic "objects" in Second Life from one server to the next,
I can recreate the identity I've made for myself. This is the real issue, and
the tougher to solve because it involves multiple entities working together
for a single end. I'm optimistic -- based on what I read is happening
at Linden Lab, IBM, Google, and other places -- that companies these days
are more interested in keeping you as a user than keeping your data. There
are still those who don't feel this way, though, and as much as I dig Facebook
and think the people working there are smart and wonderful, Facebook is one of
the worst about locking up my data. (And trust me, I know the FB platform very
well! For all the good things that it is, and all its coolness, it ain't
about data portability.)
I like that Linden Lab is working hard to make data portability a real
possibility. My understanding from what Zero said today is that ultimately
that is the real goal. That's what he means by "interoperability" -- the ability
to carry my data about myself from place to place virtually. Sure, we all
have to worry about the mechanics like authentication and usernames, but these
aren't really identity. Just logging in to play
WoW with my Second Life account --
if all I do is create my identity new on WoW -- isn't really interoperability or
my identity or data portability. It's the data that matters, not the mechanics
of authentication or establishing a user name. This point seemed lost today,
and may be why people got bogged down and needlessly worried about UUIDs
and RFIDs, which really seem irrelevant to a system that allows me to take my
data with me. Of course, I don't have to take my data if I want to create a
new account each time for each system, but right now, I have no option of carrying
data with me.
So returning to my optimism about the very real discussion going on
around this in virtual worlds... my gut (and experience building for/on the web)
says Second Life and other virtual worlds can get to this point quicker than the
web. This is likely the path to the 3D space supplanting the 2D web. If for no
other reason than that the system is being built (or rebuilt) at these early
stages with data portability in mind.
February 6, 2008
I
mentioned
recently that I had migrated this site to a new server. I'm pretty happy
about the move and just wanted to mention it here. This site now sits
on a dedicated server hosted at The Planet.
So far, so good. And (keeping in mind my experience with them is limited
to this year only) I would recommend their servers.
Jerry and I went in together on
the server, and that has kept the cost low. We're hosting both of
our personal sites and the two or three other sites we have for play.
We were both on very limited shared hosting before this -- and man!
the work I had to do to get Django running under that (no shell access,
fcgi hacks, etc.) -- and now this feels like my site is getting the
attention it deserves.
I'm running the site on Django still, but now I'm doing it
properly with mod_python. I kept with MySQL, which is what
my earlier host had because it saved me migrating to PostgreSQL
(a trivial matter, I know) and also MySQL seems to run better
with less required attention on a small site like mine. I've
already fixed a number of bugs with my site because it's easier
to do so now. And I've got a number of little changes and
new features that I'll be working on as time allows of the
next couple months.
Since I work on web sites all day long, my site never
really gets the love it deserves, but with the new hardware
I feel like I'm loving on you again Devurandom.org! And look,
I've blogged 5 times in the last 4 weeks, a new record!
February 3, 2008
A reminder to us all: it's not the fastest or the strongest that wins
the game. It's the fastest and the strongest that day
that wins.
