Web Titans Locked In a Fight for Your Identity

If your online life is anything like mine, you’ve got accounts with eleventy different online communities. We’ve got our FriendFeeds, our LiveJournals, our Facebooks, and our IM screen names. Each of these identities fragments your attention and your presence on the web. Some companies choose to openly share their slice of your online persona. Others jealously guard their slice of your identity as their own bankable asset.

Upstarts use openness as a competitive advantage

Smaller web businesses with an eye towards growth are most likely to embrace total openness and share their unique service with the existing ecosystem of services customers are already using. Think of WidgetLaboratory’s setting up a symbiotic relationship with Ning and offering companion products to the larger Ning service. Collaborating with users and Ning allowed WL to grow rapidly, but in the end this relationship dissolved because Ning didn’t share WidgetLaboratory’s desire for openness. Ning’s official reason for booting WidgetLabs was that WL had improperly accessed Ning user accounts in order to troubleshoot. This brings us to the other side of the web identity battle: Big companies that leverage their stature to suck in all the information they can while letting none out

Bigger players can be selfish
Yahoo and many other big web properties provide OpenIDs^? to their users but do not allow external OpenIDs to create accounts on their sites. Check out the Yahoo OpenID page for their cheerful description of this one-way street. They are happy to allow their users to spread their Yahoo seeds across the internet, but somehow they can’t manage to reciprocate for external users who want to use Yahoo without being branded with a big red “Y“. This is the same “walled garden” mentality we see in Facebook.

Why openness works for your company
It’s hard for companies to want to let go of information. You’ve always kept everything secret, and it’s no one’s business what you’re thinking or doing, right? I’m not going to tell you to divulge all of your trade secrets, but secrecy by default is not a forward-thinking strategy for a business. Go read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything to better understand how sharing some secrets can help you stay ahead of your competition. The short version of it is this: no monolithic organization can dominate a market through innovation. If you need to have the nimblest research and development organization in your market, you’re going to have to open up your plans to a wider audience so that you can start harnessing the minds and experience of people outside of your team.

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Web Titans Locked In a Fight for Your Identity

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