Identity is NOT Security

Dave Kearns has an interesting article looking at new developments in identity management. (http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/dir/2006/0424id1.html) He appears discouraged by the views of some of the players in the Identity management industry. There appears to be an emerging trend to equate identity with the simplistic management of user security credentials. Any player that buys in to this simplistic view of identity management is missing a huge opportunity. The growing interconnectedness that is increasingly seen in the Web 2.0 world is creating a demand for a sophisticated toolkit that enables us to manage our fragmented internet identity. If our identity is reduced to the output of a Google search that pulls together our comments from random blogs and our own musings in one or more blogs that we author, then life is going to get really challenging -really quickly. Co-Comment, 9cays and other pioneers are making attempts to pull the random threads together to make it easier for us to keep track of our activities. But this is just the start. We will see a growing need to more pro-actively manage, or compartmentalize, the discrete entities that represent different aspects of our lives. Life just keeps getting more interesting. Are we having fun yet?