Aggregate & Identify Me, Please!

Remember way back when, when you had to sign up, register, fill out a profile, pick a user name and password and add "friends" and "link in" and.....over and over and over again at every site you visited? Whether a social networking site or an e-commerce site or just a web forum. Everywhere required unique identities and profiles. What a pain! Wait a second, that wasn't way back when, it's still like that now!

Well, OK, there are some solutions floating around out there that do a variety of things such as creating a single sign-on or aggregating your social media profiles or creating an "attention" profile that can be re-used. Here are some of the players:

OpenID
ClaimID
APML
Windows CardSpace
Higgins
Sxipper
FriendFeed
Profilactic
etc.
etc.
etc.

When will someone win this battle already? I need a single place to do my "social media'ing" and I need a single sign-on and a single profile to manage. Where is the innovation - or really, the perfect evolution - for this need? C'mon, it's 2009 already!

Now some of you may say, "OK, Bill, if it's such a need, why don't you fix it, tough guy? All talk and no action, you bum!" Well, that's fair. And all I can say is that we recognize there are some big players out there in the consolidated identity space (like OpenID) and the social media aggregation space (like FriendFeed) and we want ONE of them to win. Because then, our new big idea, which will be announced at a later date, will have a good partner to work with. Yes, this plea is totally self-serving - we have an identity/social media platform we're developing that will be SOOOOOO much better if someone can figure out the other stuff. And we're not interested in being that someone right now.

There you go - my rant for the day. Well, considering how often I write posts here, it could be my rant for the month.