Identity & startups: the web (1)

Luke Razzell and Nic Brisbourne

Introduction

This post is the first in a series that explores the strategic relevance of identity for startups (a full introduction to the series, and an link index of the posts, is here).

In a society where people increasingly expect to be able to customise their experiences according to their own tastes and preferences—in other words, to have their life fit around their individual identity—startups must help users to personalise their experience better than their competition does.

The conceptual framework that we will develop through this post series is intended to help anyone who is, or would like to be, involved in building a startup to understand what opportunities, threats and unknowns identity represents for your business. We hope that non-entrepreneurs with an interest in the startup or identity worlds will find much food for thought here also.

The series will span diverse topics—including mobile, branding, law, retail, entertainment, government and mainstream media. But we start with what is arguably the single most important transformative technological innovation of our times, the pervasive digital network—and specifically the web.

I am delighted to have as co-author of this and forthcoming posts on identity, startups and the web reknowned Venture Capitalist and blogger, Nic Brisbourne.

Extending identity across the network

We experience our life through the ever-present lens of our own sense of identity. In fact, without a consistent sense of personal identity, it would be impossible for us to make sense of life at all—particularly given the incredible complexity and pace of change in modern society.

Networked technology offers the extraordinary promise of allowing us to carry our sense of personal identity beyond the geospatial and, to some extent at least, the temporal limitations of the physical world.

These new freedoms have, of course, driven the explosive growth of networked (and in particular, web-based) applications of all kinds, particularly since the advent of the web. In many ways, these applications are making our lives richer and more convenient. More and more, we are able to develop and explore our social connections and our personal interests regardless of where we, our friends or our information sources are.

So virtually far, so good!

However, there is a big catch.

The online "presence integration and privacy" problem

If we compare our offline and online experiences of identity, it becomes clear that networked applications' capacity to mediate our innate and natural ways of experiencing and expressing identity remains rudimentary. While the network gives us abilities to transcend place and time that we (quite literally) only dreamed of before its advent, it is much less good at enabling us to transfer some fundamentals of our offline identity experience into our online life.

How so?

In the physical, face-to-face world, we quite naturally carry our sense of identity about with us, yet we are also highly adept at managing which aspects of that identity we disclose to whom and when (maintaining our sense of privacy). Unfortunately, it turns out that enabling online the same kind of integrated yet privacy-enabled experience of identity that we enjoy in the physical world is a very thorny problem; a problem that has diverse technological, social, business and legal factors—and one that remains largely unsolved.


Perhaps we take an integrated and segmentable experience of our identity so for granted offline that it seems we forgot to design it into the architecture of our digital networks and the applications that run on them? Perhaps the task of constructing a truly identity-enabled network—let's call it an "Identity Web" for brevity's sake—brings up such difficult challenges that we are only beginning to figure out how to do so?

Whatever the reasons for the current identity deficit in our digital networks, we must develop a clear understanding of them if we are to remedy that deficit. Let's start by clarifying the key features that a successful "Identity Web" must exhibit—in the course of which, we will discover a potential, new economic benefit it could provide both to individuals and to the companies that serve them faithfully and transparently.

Four key requirements for an Identity Web

1) Presence integration

The Identity Web must allow us to integrate the various aspects of our presence in order to simplify and enrichen our online experience. This need for integration applies to both the aggregation and federation of personal information (information that is "about me") and personalised information (information that is "of interest to me" or "[co-]created by me").

By way of explanation: whether information represents our name and address, a blog post or photo we created, the data about our interests we tacitly generate as we interact with online services ("attention" data; e.g. our search history and clickstream on Google)—it is all potentially of value to us and we may want to be able to bring all or some of it together for re-publishing, posterity, our own insight and to improve the personalisation of other services we use (news or music recomendation services, for example).

2) Presence segmentation

The Identity Web must allow us to segment others' view of our presence—to present different views of ourselves to different individuals and groups, such as spouse, work and family—if we are to maintain our sense of "privacy". We can already achieve this kind of selective disclosure within the context of specific services—make certain photos we upload to Flickr visible only to family members, for example—but the challenge of providing users with this kind of privacy control over information across distributed and heterogenous services of an Identity Web proves to be much, much more difficult one.

It is worth noting, however, that the whole notion of privacy seems to be changing in our society: children and teenagers, in particular, are happily sharing intimately personal information and images on social networks like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook (albeit often under cover of multiple pseudonyms), and they may well carry these attitudes into their adult life. (Of course, they may also carry forward the stigma of ill-considered, online personal revelations, preserved for posterity in Google's indexes, when they come to look for employment!). It may, then, be more useful to think of presence segmentation in terms of cost-benefit tradeoffs than in terms of the complex and arguably fading concept of "privacy".

3) Online presence that is service and device independent

The Identity Web must support diverse services. We already enjoy a choice of networked services and devices that are both broadly-integrative—such as Apple's iTunes and iPod integrated computer, web and music player technology solution—but also highly-specialised and niche networked services and devices—like Twitter, which focuses solely on publishing timely, short text messages. However, unless we are to give our lives entirely over to a handful of megabrands (or perhaps just Google, ultimately!), the Identity Web must allow us to benefit from choice across diverse niche services while still enjoying the same benefits of presence integration we would get from using suites of services within the "walled gardens" of the major services.

4) The individual as unifying network node

Each of these requirements above have in common another, higher-level requirement: that the individual user should be the only entity that can aggregate and control dissemination of all the information that pertains to their identity. In other words, the user themselves must become the only unifying node in their personal identity network.

And that eventuality gives rise to a very significant commercial opportunity, for both startups and the individuals they serve.

Presence monetisation—a potential benefit of a functional Identity Web

In an Identity Web where the individual effectively becomes the only party who can both integrate and manage the disclosure of the complete set of their presence information (whereas the services the individual deals with can only access a subset of that information), that individual should be able to monetise (directly, or indirectly through discounted or free services) the value of their identity by selling access to the information. By the same token, the mediation of specific aspects of that personal identity information retail process would seem to represent a very large opportunity indeed for startups.

Conclusion

So we have suggested four key requirements for, and a potential business benefit of a functional Identity Web—a necessary overview of the problem space.

However, identifying the high level features of a future Identity Web raises some tough questions:

• What will be the business models that drive the evolution of the Identity Web?

• What are likely to be the technological, business and social drivers, blockers and unknowns that inform startups' strategy in seeking to deploy those business models?

In the following posts in the series, we will dive down into complex, multi-faceted and messy reality of the contemporary web-enabled business world and discover some possible answers to those questions.