OFace - Imagining an Identity Faceting Web Service

In Intended Audience and Social Networks, I wrote about the problem of audience in social networking software. Here’s a strawman solution to this problem.

I imagine several parts:

• FacetSwitch - A device that lets you naturally and quickly indicate your current facets (or intended audiences)
• OFace - An identity faceting service
• A dashboard so that you can review and re-categorize items you’ve published against their current facets
• Extensions to existing systems to utilize this new information

To test out these ideas I will be constructing a web service that will manage your various “facets” of your identity. These facets map to “channels” or audiences which you are writing for.

The FacetSwitch is a webpage, mobile app, or even a dedicated embedded device which has a very simple UI. It displays your currently used facets, your unused facets, and allows you to switch between them.

OFace or OpenFace would be a REST web service for managing mapping OpenIds to URLs. The FacetSwitch would update and read from this service. Additionally the service is used to capture an individual’s facets facet which they were “speaking through” when they created or updated that url. It is orthogonal to existing services and ideally could be layered onto social networking software and other content creation tools either natively via OAuth, or as an extension. Two update modes can be imagined, a “ping” mode where content creation hooks into OFace and a “batch” mode where OFace periodically checks registered feeds and automatically facets items based on timestamp.

A Dashboard would be needed for users to review and correct faceting information as needed, but it would be used infrequently, as faceting should introduce very low overhead for users.

Integration into tools, at least as a prototype, would be via Greasemonkey or another browser addon. There are at least two client side extension points:

When authors create content, then OFace would be notified of the URL being operated on.

When viewers look at content or a feed of content, then they should see a halo or other indication of which facets are in effect and which could be “listened in on”. The content items would be filtered down to only content of interest.

I am thinking of attacking to start exploring these ideas within the domain of lifestreaming applications.

Initially security and privacy aren’t the main focus. It’s more to test the ideas of faceted identity and intended audience.