Back after the summer (what summer!) break, it’s a great time to be around - the world’s financial markets are crashing, bad advice is coming home to roost and solid thinking is back in fashion. Ace.
I registered my I-name (=dower) today to simplify my OpenId world and it got me thinking back to the future of the web. We are living more and more in an information age but we are limited by our human ability to sift and transfer information and this seems crazy. My PC and the various places (pods) that I inhabit on the net has lots of information about me, letting potential suppliers (retailers, insurance companies) see this information makes a huge amount of sense; they could better tailor their offers and even (on a mass scale) create products and services just for people like me. So why don’t they?
TRUST. No-one seems to trust anyone. So lets go create a framework for a trust network? It seems to work well enough in the social networking world so why not across all web-platforms? OpenID and I-name seem to be part of the solution, a form of machines trusting machines to share the right data at the right time, I’m sure it will evolve once the in-fighting within the various technical steering committees is resolved.
Ignoring (for the moment) the nay-sayers fears about abuse, privacy and control it would certainly make my life a good deal simpler if my (common and public) information was available to every web-resource I visit so it could tailor my experience. Better still, if the i-brokers could provide real secure trust in the same way that credit-card companies do online then you as a i-surfer could choose your provider based on personal preferences. In this world of mass-collaboration it seems a shame that machines cannot yet collaborate in the same way us humans are starting to.
A world where every web-resource knows exactly what it needs to know from you to give you exactly what you want. Sounds like nirvana to me 
In fact very few do, and those that do tend to be a bit geeky!