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?