Joop: I’m happy to hear that!

When the first train was announced it scared the shit out of people. Scientist predicted that people would be unable to breathe at speeds higher than 30 miles an hour.

The crowd that witnessed the first movie ran out of the theatre when they viewed a train heading for the screen at full speed.

People are generally afraid of new things but that doesn’t mean it is always bad. The general idea is that more privacy is always better. I think the truth is less extreme. In some cases more privacy is need. In other cases less privacy is actually better for both parties.

“The future of the web is about removing anonymity, not extending it.”
That scares the sh*t out of me.

I assume that webmasters who are willing to participate can do so for free, or did you think of a subscription-like service?

Robin: the service should be free/open for both users and webmasters.

You don’t even need a service for this. It might be a small extension to your browser.

Arjen: exactly, as far as regular users would concern it’s no more then that. But still webmasters will need to implement the Nameo-functionalities in their own way… I’m willing to implement it when there’s a proto available. ;-)

It would be great if webmasters wouldn’t even have to sign up or implemt special stuff. If the cookies contain a value ‘nameo-firstname’ where user could leave their firstname then the webmaster could simply print ‘nameo-firstname’ where ever they would like…

Hey,

About technique; cookies are not the best solution I think.
The plugin for the browser must send automaticly a header when you browse the internet. Same like if you’re sending your User Agent Information, or your Proxy information headers. Then it’s easy for every website to catch this information, because cookies are domain-related.

Nice idea.
Lennie

@Lennie

Cookies *can* be domain specific. The cookie domain restriction however lets you set a cookie that will be sent to any domain you visit. Just call the domain “.” and you are done. In the case the browser doesn’t like this you can set a cookie for every tld.

I must say I agree with Lennie on the “header-option”. That way you also prevent the user from (accidentally) deleting his cookies, so imho reliability would increase when you’d add the data into header sections… Sounds good.

@Arjen,

Ah okay didn’t know that. But headers are easier I think (also to develop for the plugin-maker).

Nice idea,

I think IP/MAC addresses could be useful here…
Think about an open database where users could add information to their IP/MAC address(es)…

@Mathijs:

Not in every country you have static IP-address.
Also not very usefull when you’re not always on the same place.

Yeah, and it is possible to retrieve a MAC Address but that doesn’t work if there is a network (firewall, switch or any other hardware with NAT) between the user and the server. Keeping the info in the Userclient seems like a better option…

The mybloglog solution combined with a browser plugin then?

Yes Mathijs! Very similar! I like the analogy very much…

It’s called OpenID :). When OpenID becomes mainstream so will personalization.

The current implementation of OpenID is only about ’single sign-on’ but I predict in the near future data from sites will be interlinked by using the OpenID as the identifier. Our data gets accessible more and more (e.g. API’s, RSS, etc) and as soon as this information on all those sites can be linked with eachother personalization will become mainstream and at a bar you’ve never been before you can order ‘the usual’. (that is, if bars are already fully connected to the web by then).

@Marc

OpenId is an solution for centralized authentication. But that is not what we propose here. OpenId is not designed to stop anonymous browsing. I want to push/broadcast some of my personal information to any website I visit, so without any authentication or centralized service the website knows who I am.

It should be just like introducing yourself, in good manner, to the person you meet for the first time.

@Arjen
Yes, currently OpenID is used as a centralized authentication system. But in the near future (perhaps it’s already happening on some sites, I don’t know) the data between all those OpenID-enabled websites will be able to move freely within this network of OpenID-enabled sites. This is (in my opinion) the big idea behind OpenID, not the single-sign-on issue. It will actually be part of the protocol.

I do think you will have to log in at every website to give them access to your information. However, there will probably be a OpenID provider which lets you auto-approve all requests. Hell, you could even build your own provider if no one else offered it.

Ofcourse nameo.org could be the first OpenID provider to do this! (again, I’m not sure about the current status of OpenID so it may already be implemented)

So when you introduce yourself and hand the other person your business card, or in this case your hCard: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
Which is a nice way to markup this information.

Passing the receiving website an OpenID URL with the hCard information there does have merit. A site can directly retrieve the hCard or it can use the OpenID to check your ownership of the URL and perhaps also log you in.

Hcard microformat is a great solution, by using a standard, for formatting you personal data.

@Marc OpenId is not about setting up a uniform format for data interchange between openId enabled web services. Although it can receive updated information from one service and send it to all the other services I have approved, it is limited to identity information only. And using an external openId server does not enable me to broadcast my identity to all sites I visit, that is what Nameo is about.

LennieZ convinced me this afternoon that using a header instead of cookies is more easy. Although you don’t want to introduce a new header type. So misusing a cookie header, which is automatically added to every request by a plug in, uses all current standards.

Boris, you state: “Privacy is overrated.” I think that is a very easy statement to make, and I don’t agree with it at all. About one and a half month ago we discussed privacy at Ymerce (a great read! (in Dutch)) so I won’t repeat all those arguments here.

Regarding Nameo: what’s in it for me? I don’t see any advantages for the average web user.
Everyone has already created accounts at the big sites, or they will create them if the site offers something worthwile. (socializing with friends, buying products, etc). Next to that, most sites don’t need any personal information to offer me a worthwile service. Cookies are sufficient in most situations.

I think OpenID will be the way to go for the future. That will make personal information portable, in a decentralized way, while also allowing people to control what sites may use what information.

Last but not least, 15 minutes of fame is so 1960’s. It’s 15 seconds of fame in this age, and the best way to achieve that is to do something stupid while being completely oblivious of the fact someone is taping your actions and uploading the results to youtube (or sending them to GeenStijl et al.). Signing up for a reality tv show is another option, of course.

@Roel: thank you for your thoughts.

My feeling is that people often mistake ‘Privacy’ for ‘Anonymity’. Of-course I want to have privacy and I hope people respect that. But I don’t need to be anonymous. When I meet people in a bar the first thing I do is say my name. In a networking environment I wear a name-tag and exchange business-cards. I’m happy when people in stores know my name as a returning customer.

On the web, I always seem to be anonymous.

Nameo.org would be the digital equivalent of a name-tag. It isn’t a business-card and my privacy is still save. But sites can offer me services based on the information I am willing to share.

I’m not shy about my birth-date, first name and town and country that I live in. I also don’t mind saying that I speak Dutch but also understand English. My credit card information, sexual preferences and email address I would like to keep for myself.

That information would benefit the sites I visit and the services I use. And that, in the end, would benefit me.

Indeed, privacy does not equal anonimity. If your mention of personal data only concerns information that is normally present on a business card, then I was talking about something else.

However, I still wouldn’t sign up for Nameo. Why? Nameo would maybe only transmit my name to all websites, but isn’t that the same as my IP address? I mean, that already makes me identifiable. Any website can detect I am a returning visitor and show a message “Welcome back!”. Can you give me an example of the added value Nameo could provide? And which personal data will Nameo transmit to the web?

Regarding my last questions: I forgot to mention that any website can retrieve my country and city of residence by verifying my IP address against a geo-IP database. That’s how Google and other large website serve you a local version of their site automagically.
So only my age could be relevant information for a website (assuming my IP address has the same value as my name).

The important thing is that a new service should solve a problem for me. If Nameo was something like a decentralized ID with networking capabilities (openID, microformats, etc), that would help.
Why? Because we have a problem.

@roel: a Geo-IP database is about 80% accurate in guessing where you are. Why not simply let people introduce themselves when they visit your site and serve them better? ‘Hi, I’m Boris from Amsterdam’.

I think Roel was talking about identification, an IP-address is one way of identifying a user. You (Boris) are talking about personalization which does indeed means you have to provide your personal details.

However, I still think OpenID is the way to go since nobody wants to subscribe to yet another webservice. Ofcourse, you can still integrate it with OpenID.

@Arjen
Why do you think it’s limited to identity information only? If for example, Del.icio.us uses OpenID and I login at a Digg it should be able to access my bookmarks and suggest related stories. Sure it’s not the way it currently works but if people want to share this data I’m sure this will happen and OpenID is in my opinion the best way to do this since it’s the least obtrusive.

“And using an external openId server does not enable me to broadcast my identity to all sites I visit, that is what Nameo is about.”
Well these website should at least have to add some Nameo-related code right? If so, why wouldn’t they use a (proven) open standard like OpenID which can handle the same think?

I’m not saying Nameo is a bad idea I just think it’s basically something that’s already included in OpenID but we just have to wait for it to become mainstream for it to work.

So my suggestion for Nameo is to start developing standards to exchange data using OpenID.

Good points Marc! It is always good to see what is currently available and check if you can build on top of that.