We’ll be announcing some major partners this week, stay tuned.

I use openID ever single chance I can get because it doesn’t require me to have a profile at tons of different places.

I see the web as a loose nit place where you have fifty million accounts at fifty million different places. Wouldn’t it be great to have one signin and one account to maintain that you could take with you everywhere?

That’s the point of openID and if a ‘profile’ of sorts could be attached to openID and you’d bring it with you…i think it would take the world by storm.

@Martin How do you envisage it being implemented?

The weakness of facebook is that it’s quite imperial in some respects. Surely much better to use Flickr and YouTube for photo and video sharing but at the moment that’s not really practical.

For security/data protection applications, this is already being worked; policy based access controls are not so different, with data being available based on a users attributes (security clearance, location, date/time, etc.).

What really concerns me is the lack of random discovery; if everything is selected to fit your stated likes, how do you find new things? Algorithmic selection can only go so far before feeling limited and constrained; this is one reason why so many people still enjoy editorially selected and developed content. Half of the New York Times or Slate articles I wind up enjoying are not the ones I would decide to read entirely based on existing/defined preferences.

Definitely think that this type of on-the-fly personalisation based on user-data/profile portability will tranform the experience for users, and the proposition that sites/services have to offer (in terms of massively increased relevancy and therefore interaction potential). And it’s obviously interesting in relation to all forms of discovery, whether social (i.e. people), content, or products/servives (as you say).

Guess the main challenge (beyond mutual adoption) is in the site-side plugin/data interaction for the dynamic personalisation to take place (whether done just through data standardisation or also in conjunction with smart search technology). Great to see that Last.fm is pioneering this from a music perspective through your developer platform. Microformats obviously represent an enabler in some areas (well, in respect to the data standardisation bit at least), and Yahoo’s recent announcement of support for microformats in their shopping proposition (millions of sets of products info being microformatted) is interesting, and potentially a building block for this stuff in that space.

We’re very into this as a theme for boxedup.com, which is a shopping utility which has various social angles (characteristically similar to delicious, but specifically for products, so providing a universal list of the things that you want to get from any shop/site on the web). So the application of this approach would be that when a user visits an online store their boxedup profile/lists travel with them and they can automatically see either specific things they want that are available from that site (and what the price is), or if there are things that are related to the things they want/the types of things that they’re into. So your delicious example is directly relevant, but in the context of shopping rather than news. Obviously it’s a non-trivial challenge, but it’s the type of thing that’s needed on the web to make the shopping experience more coherent and intelligent (and shopping is obviously a significant, and fast growing, online activity). We’re a very early stage start-up, and are keen to get people onboard who have this type of shared vision (in terms of backing and guidance), so if this is a space that you’re interested in then we’d love to talk to you! (Sorry for the plug, but hopefully I’ve also contributed to the debate here)

Anyway, thanks for the interesting piece. Think this type of dynamic/on-the-fly (but passive) personalisation will be a central theme in the development of the web - it definitely needs to be in order to reduce the barriers to engagement for users on new sites/services; it’s openness with very tangible payback potential for participants.

PS Om - I love the type of discussion and debate you get here