You can’t get away from silos, everywhere you have your profile data - is a silo
Yo dudes. If one’s data isn’t in a silo, where is it? On your desktop machine? Or some anonymous ID broker? Or where? I’m saying that regardless where the data is - it wants to move.
Sure you can (and should) keep a master copy somewhere - but why is an ID broker NOT a silo. To me - that’s just another flavor or silo. Don’t take a high a mighty position with me saying that these so-called ’safe’ data havens aren’t just the ‘hustle du jour’ and yet another form of mousetrap.
Yah sure - thrid wave of identity products. Uh huh? What is Identity anyway? Better yet - what is a product?
Remember when Mary Hodder asked “which ID broker do we support?” at the OpenID2 meeting in August? I then asked “OK - who is willing to go out of business?” Because what Mary was saying was “make my lfie easier for me - just decide who I’m supposed to trust, and we’ll go with THAT.
But in the room - were 7 or 8 different ID broker vendors. And EACH of their business models rely upon folks like Mary and you to trust them - to keep their data AWAY from the mean old data silos.
Well good luck with that.
As long as these folks can get sued, they’re probably gonna keep BETTER watch out over you data - then some small startup. I’d rather have my data on Yahoo’s servers - than someone I never heard of.
Marc Cantor sets out his “ID Hub” story in further detail today. But he completely misses the point of the third wave of identity products. Cantor says he wants to “enable folks to easily move their personal data in and OUT of the system. ”
In other words, he wants to make it easier for you to copy all of your data from one silo to another!
But the promise of the third wave of identity is that silos are no longer necessary - silos can be removed - because identity data is available to be used whenever and wherever it’s needed - the data should be pervasive and ubiquitous as well as federated and distributed.
The silos don’t need my data when I’m not there, so there’s no need for them to keep copies of it. It’s actually better that they don’t keep a copy since getting the data at the moment it’s needed guarantees it’s accuracy.
The bottom line is very simple: silos are bad. Making it easier to populate silos is aiding and abetting bad behavior. In criminal law, those who aid and abet a wrongdoer are also guilty. It should be the same in the identity market.
So this guy Dave acually thinks that - somehow - one can get their profile data - updated, in sync, magically from - from where? What’s the name of the service that delivers this profile and meta-data - instantly - at a moments notice? i-names? MyOpenID? What?
Cause if that service has a name, and a brand and bills to pay and a boss and ambition - well then they’re a silio - too.
And so now that I’ve dispelled this nitpick about hating data silos - lets get back to what I was REALLY saying - which is that the ONLY way to make ALL users happy - is to guarentee that everyone can move their data wherever. Hoiw oculd you possibly disagree with that.
If you folks have a better way of doing it, of achieving a master profile architecture - you just let me know. And please specify the URL and name of the company or service - I mean data silo/ID broker.
And oh - BTW - speaking of Identity. We have a saying where I come from “just spell my name right” - it’s CantEr. 
January 31st, 2007 at 12:56 am
Any real world website where User profiles are a key part of the system has to store that profile data locally (at least for now). Hoping to build pages by getting that profile data on the fly from somewhere else just isn’t going to work. Not even for single profile pages let alone pages that have data from lots of members at the same time. So for the moment I consider this approach of trying to do away with Silos by saying their not necessary and getting all profile data on the fly to be just academic wanking.
So if you’ve got a local (cache) copy of profiles, you’ve got to deal with data in, data out and data sync. Deal with that and it shouldn’t matter where the master copy is. In fact it probably should be on a server under my control and not some external aggregator silo somewhere. Although that won’t suit everyone and there’ll be a market for systems that can do it all for you. And every Social Network site will want to offer that facility in the hope that their system is the keeper of your master profile copy.
Which is just another way of saying “You’re right, Marc”!
January 31st, 2007 at 7:41 am
That you don’t know who I am says volumes about you Marc, and little about me. But it does show the depth of your ignorance about identity.
Users, by the way don’t want to move their data, they want to use their data. Their data. Not some silo’s data. But in the spirit of furthering your education, try checking on the technology of “distributed data” - it’s been around for a few years and will probably stick!