Messaging’s new wave.
Is the e-mail address about to become the universal “identity card” on the Internet? I say it is.
In the early 1990s, I gawked at a chart in Unixworld. It listed the various electronic mail gateways between the major e-mail systems: Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, AT&T, a few others, and the Internet (SMTP). It was all a tangled mess of different systems and different address. You had colons, exclamation points, question marks, and all kinds of things going on in the e-mail addresses. A couple of years later, the only e-mail address anyone cared about was the one with a few dots and an @ in the middle. The switch was fast.
Today, we have a new mess, the messaging mess.
E-mail, chat, Usenet, web logs, RSS, Atom, forums, e-groups, news web sites, mailing lists (of the listserv variety), and more all inhabit roughly the same space. Yet there are pitifully few links between them, and little unification. Keeping track of seemingly 75 different usernames and passwords to different web sites is no fun. Juggling a bunch of dissimilar programs to manage them is not fun, either.
That’s bound to change, and soon.
I’m betting that the e-mail address will become a person’s core identity on the Internet. It will become the web site login name, the chat handle, the web log address, the forum sign-on ID, and so on.
You should be able to sign into Internet-wide chat services, web forums, Usenet, and everything else using just your e-mail address and password. Your e-mail account provider should provide that as a service transparently.
Instead of going to a web log (like this site) at http://www…. you might go to one at soandso@example.com. Except you wouldn’t “go” to their web log, you would go visit their identity, and interact with it in whatever variety of messaging is appropriate, which might include viewing their web log.
For chat, the ID provider should connect you to a Jabber service that in turn connects to all chat available on the net. You should also be able to talk to just one person without entering a chat room.
Perhaps some e-mail accounts will have a display of what services the e-mail user participates in, listing e-mail, chat, forums, or whatever. This would be analogous to finger. Of course, privacy-minded users could keep their information hidden from the world.
Maybe there will even be new life for UUCP. (!)
By then, RSS and Atom feeds should be downloadable from the local Usenet server (one RSS item per Usenet post). (*) That way, when the day comes that a popular web log like Instapundit gets millions of syndication hits per day, the Instapundit web site will not be hammered. (†) You should be able to get on Usenet with your single sign-on ID (the e-mail address), and push content upstream via RSS using the same ID, too.
Authenticated web polls would be more accurate (though they would still be misleading).
You should be able to log in to news web sites that require “free” registration seamlessly. When you need to login, your e-mail address provider could send unique authentication packets to both your web browser and the web server that requests authentication (let’s say it’s nytimes.com). If, when mathematically combined, the authentication packets are good, you get access to the web site.
Need an “anonymous” username for some reason? Your provider should be able to give you a second or third ID that can remain secret, and not publicly tied to your true ID.
When a spammer is detected, everything he posted could be deleted in one fell swoop, as today when a Usenet post is canceled. Inevitably, though, the pressure will be on “e-mail providers” to ratchet up the level of authentication they do of new users. Perhaps new would-be users will have to show the provider a photo-ID card before they are given a new webmail account. That way a spammer’s true identity would be known, paving the way for criminal prosecution.
You might be able to sign up for a Yahoo or Hotmail or whatever account at your local Kinko’s copies or supermarket, flashing your ID there.
It’s only a matter of time before the competing single sign-on standards like Microsoft’s Passport and the Liberty Alliance’s system bite the dust, defeated by what we today call the e-mail address.
I don’t think enormous fortunes will be made on this, because when it happens, no one will have much price leverage on any part of the service. If it happens, it will happen universally and quickly.
I look forward to these changes. It should make being on the net easier.
Of course, the antithesis of all this is the peer-to-peer movement. This is the dark underground of the net. The people who inhabit those waters are the rebels. They do not want to be authenticated or convenienced. They will co-exist with the authenticated, single sign-on world because although most people want convenience, not everybody wants the cost of convenience, whatever that may be.