In my vision statement I note that the development of a presence on the web, for any individual, relies on what is essentially a one to one mapping between a web based entity (or identifier) and that person's identity in the "real" world.
Intuitively, it would seem a person's name would be a good candidate to act as this web identifier. But, there are a number of reasons why this is not the case; the main ones being that many people have the same name - and over a lifetime people do change all, or part, of their names.
At this time there is considerable debate over this issue of how people should, and can be identified as "authentic", driven to some extent by the pending emergence of Google+. This social nework service is insisting that people use their real name, and that this name is linked to other information that identifies them as a "real" person. While this does not go all the way to achieving, what would be a Unique Personal Identifier, in my view it is a step in the right direction.
In my view a good upi should have the following characteristics:
- It must be unique as a set of characters on the web. For example, before setting up a upi, the combination of characters should not be locatable by any search engine.
- The upi must be owned by the individual it represents. A upi cannot be provided as a service (although its management could be).
- More than one person could choose the same upi, but eventually it will be the person who makes the most use of the code that has that upi mapped against them. Others will have no advantage in maintaining that upi and will need to try another. In this sense there are similarities to the #tag in twitter. It is use that gains ownership, not any absolute right to the character set.
- The upi should contain at least some identifying characters that can be related back to the individual who owns it.
- High use of a upi will ultimately assign it to a particular identity.
My upi is - upi:dyd-dgyeo - a upi containing 3 parts; upi to denote it is a upi, dyd = denys yeo digital, dgyeo = initials and surname. In fact, none of these three components stand alone as being unique in a web search; however as a combination they (currently any way) are unique.
The upi should be mapped, or stamped, onto as many web instances featuring the individual it denotes as possible. If the upi, or similar model does become more of a feature, it may be that special space for it could emerge in sites, such as social networking sites, in a similar manner to tag information input sections. It will really be accepted if it gets its own html label, imagine: <UPI>upi:dyd-dgyeo</UPI> in a header!