in the future: the person will become the portal

I wrote this in response to a post on Zaadz on web 2.0 and networks. This relates to what I’ve been thinking about with regards to empowering each person as a portal to create exponential value in networks and communities…

This wave of attention on sites such as MySpace, Friendster, and yes Zaadz too, has just peaked. People will eventually find social network sites limiting, as they did their Hotmail or Yahoo account…. ALL these network sites limit an individual’s identity and creative expression. (The only possible exception I see with some promise are the 43 network sites.) An individual’s identity is partially dependent on the digital spaces they inhabit and interact in. And yet my identity on Zaadz (or any other social network) does not exist outside of Zaadz. If Zaadz were to go down, I would go down with it. This does not follow the way we network in the real tangible world.

Let’s say Zaadz were an actual physical place where our community got together to interact. When I leave Zaadz, I retain every single aspect of my identity (my body/thoughts/content/etc). It does not “stay” at Zaadz. I can also take that same identity to any place of my choosing, and connect with other people outside of Zaadz. The way these social networks sites are structured does not allow for this kind of interpolation or interconnecting. This does not mirror how we interact with people in physical spaces.

If I go to a Starbucks to meet a friend, Starbucks does not own or retain my identity in any way. My choice to interact with another person at a Starbucks does add to my identity. The very experience of actively being there does inform and influence my identity. (E.g. I hear a song they play, buy the album, and become a jazz fan.) My choices as to what I can consume there may be limited. And the experience of the environment may be specific. But the individual expression of my own personal identity is limitless and unbound.

So how does a “web 2.0” site start? First of all you must own and host your own domain. (E.g. ThisisPashmina.com) Then you build or find the tools and services you need to express yourself and include them on your own domain. (E.g. Wordpress, Flickr, Del.icio.us) I would add a quality factor to all the tools of your choosing, and add that they must all allow for easy publishing, importing, exporting, porting/pushing/pulling of any kind really.

Now the second part takes some thinking. (I think this is the killer biz opp.) Once you have your own website (your own digital identity), how do you connect to another website? Certainly not through these old methods, where you’ll need over a gazillion different logins/passwords for each type of service…yech! There must be some overall one meta-identity that I can use, as say my agent. And that agent knows who Michael is, and always grants Michael certain privileges that I deem appropriate, no matter what services we are using. And that same agent should also allow for connecting Myspace with Zaadz. Or Google photos with Flickr. And on and on…