Previously I wrote about the need for Web app integration as one of the big, but hard to solve, opportunities of the next generation Internet. Another area closely related to this is one of online identity management.

My initial interest related to this area was based on the concept of user fatigue at social networking and other online areas. I have to put up the same information every time I want to join another community/application and it simply gets quite tiresome to have to do it over and over again. I have all those profiles and files all over the web that represent who I am. Where we were taking the Alele concept was to have a single interface that aggregates all of this stuff and enables one to manage it in one place.

Regardless, I became more keen with the opportunities with identity management after meeting Addy Lee at the GVU Spring Research Showcase. Addy did some interesting work on the “Analysis of Dating Behavior on Social Networking Sites,” that got us to talking. Addy is a smart young lady that is graduating in May and has accepted a job with Yahoo! She introduced me to the concept of identity leakage, the work of Fred Stutzman with ClaimID, and Susan Gov and her work on identity management in online communities.

My takeaway on all of this academic interaction is that something is changing in the way people engage with the Internet. There sure is a lot of twittering going on and a big reason why is some change in our psyche. To quote Fred, “we share our ideas in public via blogs or social networks, and the Internet is essentially a fully semantic read/write interconnected web of our thoughts.” When you combine this with Google becoming a reputation management system I think there is great opportunity in understanding this cultural shift and creating applications that enable users to effectively manage their online identities in such an environment. While ClaimID is interesting and I want to fully understand Fred’s thoughts behind it, it is not the complete answer. It is the beginning of the answer.

The complete answer is a vibrant application that know who you are, what you want to expose, where you want to expose it, and who you want to expose it too.