Facebook has exploded within JISC at the moment and immediately brought up the obvious question - do I really want my boss to see photos of the party I was at last Saturday? This can alternatively be phrased ‘what does Facebook offer in a professional or learning context?’.

Facebook recognises this to some extent by allowing a ‘limited profile’ option - but this only allows me to have one type of limit. This is OK for separating professional and social requirements at a very basic level but does not really address the complexity of relationships that we build in our social, working and learning lives.

Ideally I would like to be able to present a different ‘face’ to each each of the groups I am associated with. That doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch and fits in neatly with the discussions we have been having in JISC around Identity Management and its role in relation to user-centric environments.

Most people talk about the problem of us having ‘multiple identities’. I have always disliked this this phrase - I’m fairly sure that I only have one identity…I just choose to interact with people and systems in different ways. In this case, I really have multiple persona and want to express these persona in different ways in my online interactions.

Some of my persona are ‘affiliated’ to organisations (banks, institutions, work, local squash club) and that affiliation determines my behaviour both in terms of how I wish to present myself and in terms of what I am authorised to access or do. In most of these scenarios I present some element or attributes of my ‘real world identity’ (another term I dislike but can’t think of anything more intelligent to use instead).

Other persona I use are purely social and important because I am fully responsible for the management and protection of these persona, which means I have think very carefully about my personal attribute release policy (i.e. what I reveal about myself in these scenarios). A good example of this is my personal blog, which has no discernible relationship with my real world identity at all.

This also ties in neatly with the other problem that is being discussed in many different fora at the moment (including a debate on OpenID on the jisc-middleware-development list) - the difference between social trust and technical trust. I’ll leave that for another time!

According to Windows Messenger on my computer, I am now Melissa. Mel logged in to my laptop at a meeting last week and clearly made a memorable impression as it hasn’t wanted to forget her ever since. It doesn’t matter how many times I reset, it always goes back to Mel. The only way we have managed to stop this happening (and stop me having the temptation of some interesting chats with Mel’s friends incognito) is to reset Mel’s password.

As well as being slightly disappointed in the unfaithfulness of my machine, it is a good reminder of how easy it is to leave an identity trail everywhere…

This is an interesting article from e-week.com describing the use of SAML to enable single sign-on to Google Apps.  It fairly accurately reflects the world we all live in with a mixed economy of a Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure, VMWare, an Identity Management solution from an independent company (Sxip), web based applications from Google Apps all glued together with an open standard through SAML.   To me, a very sensible rather than purist approach to making the most of standards.

It also prompted me to download Sxipper.  This is a Firefox plug-in for managing identity information and access credentials, and also an OpenID provider.  Looks interesting…but have not had a chance to properly play with yet.