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There’s been a large movement online towards consolidating identity.  Single sign-on (SSO) online has been a goal for a long time, starting with Microsoft’s Passport and then the OpenID and Open Stack movement.  Facebook Connect, in its short life, has probably done a lot more to enhance the progress.  It’s not yet ubiquitous, but many sites support Facebook Connect to not only provide identity and authentication, but to let users interact with their friends through the site.  Google has a product as well, Friend Connect, which is a more open version (supports OpenID) though less popular flavor of the same thing.

What’s fascinating is how this movement is happening with the telephone as well, in a seemingly parallel track.  Convergence will happen sooner than we think.  I’m terrible at remembering numbers – but pretty soon we won’t need to.  That’s what makes Google owning GrandCentral (now Google Voice) fascinating – at some point, the phone number (at least the way we think of it today) will be superfluous.  The Palm Pre already connects to Facebook, Android phones to Google.  The phone number will essentially become the device ID.

This why owning the digital identity of the individual is so important to Facebook and Google.  At some point, reaching individuals via phone will be based entirely on a digital identifier, i.e. SSO will apply to phones, and our digital identity will be the conduit for communication.  It may be our email address (like it is with online payment), or our Facebook identity.  There are pros and cons of both, and clearly both companies want to be in the middle.  By being the broker of communication, they will become the telecom companies of the next generation.  A lot of this is obvious, but my hope is that it’s done in an open fashion.   I’m just looking forward to the day where all I will need is an online ID and that’s it.

Last week I attended an event here in the Valley with Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the US.  Not too long ago, I was heavily involved in politics (worked on campaigns, etc), and technology was rarely talked about, so I was extremely curious about what he would have to say.  Turns out I learned a personal lesson as well.

As we all know, change can take forever in political organizations, as well as in large enterprises.  What struck me as refreshing from Chopra’s talk was the administration’s efforts to tackle short-term problems initially, with a broader vision in mind.  That way, at least some progress can be demonstrated.  The example he gave was that by September (90 days after they announced the idea), they would develop a new website that will allow immigrants to check their application status online.  While not fully satisfying his broader goal of immigration reform, it does represent a non-trivial first step to get there.

I took the lesson as something I should consider myself.  Oftentimes in our lives when we seek change, whether it’s personal or professional, we try to aim for the ultimate goal and get frustrated when we fail to achieve it quickly.  While I think we must have longer-term vision, I think having specific, short-term goals to get there is extremely helpful and helps us feel like we are making progress.

Anyways, I know this is off-topic, but I have been thinking about this recently, and trying to figure out different areas of my life where I need to define some short-term goals that will help me achieve my vision.