Chris Messina, David Recordon, John McCrea, Josh Elman, and Kaliya Hamlin got together for The Social Web TV at SXSW to muse about the differences between “real identity” versus pseudonyms as we have grown accustom to using on the web. It’s interesting to hear people at the forefront of identity talk about so-called “fabricated” identity with the subtle implication that it is something undesirable. I believe there are two overlapping discussions here: one about identity and the other about identifiers.

OpenID is a great technology for many reasons but relevant to this topic it is specifically great for three reasons:

1. Identifiers are limitless and easy to create.
2. There is no central governing body to the creation of identifiers.
3. As soon as an identifier is generated it can be used.

The reason I like this design so much is that it unknowingly mirrors what human beings have grown accustom to in regards to identifiers. In reality, I have several identifiers:

• Aaron van Kaam
• Rabbit
• VK

Those are terms others have used to refer to me. Identifiers can also be assigned based on location, appearance, or hundreds of other factors. These are all valid identifiers:

• The guy with the pink and blue bike
• The guy who lives at 404 Not Found Street
• Mike Ortiz’s friend
• The guy over there.

We wouldn’t think of these as identifiers because that isn’t the sort of language we use in practice but they serve the same function as a digital identifier. Some of these identifiers are temporary because they are based on relationships, location, or possessions but OpenID also has the potential for temporary identifiers.

Chris Messina may believe the identifier “Chris Messina” is closer to his identity than “factoryjoe” but from a web perspective it is whatever he chooses to make it. In the real world, I am sometimes called Rabbit. In fact, I’m more comfortable being called by that name even though it is not my name in any legal sense. Does it matter? I don’t think it does. Any more than being called “The guy with blond hair”. The identifier is meant to serve the purpose of pointing to my identity and to that purpose it serves it well.

I question the importance and value people are placing on the quality of Facebook granted identity. Ultimately, for most business purposes, the only important thing is that money is able to be transferred from one point or another. Whether the money comes from “Aaron” or “Rabbit” really doesn’t matter to most businesses. Marketing people will always cringe and pitch a fit to my logic here and that’s because they don’t get it. Identity is meant to be fluid. The web did not give birth to pseudonyms because we were lacking a proper namespace. The web has pseudonyms because it falls in line with how we internally process identity.

Thoughts?

So obviously we had a photoshoot for our pictures. They’re great, I had a lot of fun with them but here’s the kicker: Everyone I’ve talked to asks me if I was influenced by something because of my grotesquely red eyes. NOPE!

It turns out that the lights for those profile pictures were actually little suns 6 inches from my sensitive and typically crystal-clear baby blues. So what happened is I tried to keep my eyes open and then I started crying. Long story short, the trick which my fellow caring co-workers failed to inform me of was to close my eyes until the shot was just about to be taken.

Now I don’t need to type out the story to everyone on AIM. I can just link them here. The power of the internet is useful yet again!

Last month, a handful of purple rockers took a road trip to Jacksonville, FL – the hometown and headquarters of Bono’s Bar-B-Q. We met up with Bono’s COO Josh Martino to celebrate the launch of the new website. Watch the video of our trip!

Last month, Purple, Rock, Scissors was entombed in a freight elevator, exposed to the seemingly endless flashes of photographer Josh Letchworth. What for? The official Purple, Rock, Scissors photo shoot. Each team member took turns in front of the lights for close ups and body shots.

"Working with Josh is super fun. He makes you feel like a rockstar," says lead developer Rob Zienert.

Josh’s portfolio features work for Rolling Stone, Nike 6.0, Quiksilver, Red Bull and notably more. A special thanks to Josh for working with our team, and as always, delivering the goods. For more photos, check out the team section. And make sure to visit Josh at www.joshletchworth.com.

Behind-the-scenes with Josh Letchworth

When we develop web sites, we try in best efforts to always use lorem ipsum text for placeholder content. There isn’t anything more embarrassing than deploying a site live and obscurely finding forgotten placeholder text. In the past, we’ve always just fine-combed the web site content for any occurrences but it’s becoming more and more difficult as our projects grow in scope. For our new web site, I decided it was a waste of time to mindlessly drone through the web site trying to pick up any lipsum occurrences. Enter: Lorem Hunter, for lack of a better name nor really caring what it’s called.

Lorem Hunter is an internal script that I created which spiders a designated domain and does all of the mind-numbing work for you. With some simple configuration changes, we can execute the script and come back later to a report of all pages which contain lorem ipsum text so it can be addressed.

Tools like these make life so much easier… version one (which is undoubtably verbose) is just a smidge over 250 lines of code and 1 hour of typing away. I’ll be looking into the possibility of releasing it as a web service, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

We love clothes. And coincidentally, we know everything there is to know about fashion – well, at least enough to roll out a few new designs. It’s limited edition, hot off the press, and ready for visual consumption. Let us know what you think. You can log in with your Facebook account, and leave us a comment. Spread the good news!

Zend Framework has released 1.8 Preview! I’ve been looking forward to this release for quite a while, as it opens a few doors for the community to leap forward. My favorite part from the 1.8 release is everything to do with Zend_Application.

Standardized directory structure. One of the great things about Zend Framework is that it’s not built with assumptions on how a project should be developed, but instead puts the power in the developers’ hands to determine what is best for the project. However, with Zend_Application, there is now a default recommended structure laid out. The amazing thing about this is perhaps we’ll start seeing a little more exchange of modules instead of just library code.

Hopefully my personal project, ZFComponents.com, will be completed by the stable release of 1.8 and offer valuable assistance in bringing module exchange to a more accessible front for the community. Hopefully Dave Marshall, creator of ZF Snippets, and I will be able to work something out for cross promotion of our services.

My goal for an initial feature list on ZFComponents is to include a Developer Directory, Project pages and a Repository aggregator. I can’t wait to hear from the community what other features they’d like to see down the line.