rw: Imagining a del.icio.us for people/identitites (3.d-longish):

The basic concept is that you’d use your computer or your mobile device to search for someone within a network of friends or some other community, click on their name, and have your browser zoom in to their location anywhere in the world. Maybe you can then open a communication link to them — voice, IM, SMS, whatever — or, if they happen to be cruising around Second Life or There.com at the moment, would let you drill down further to find them within that world and even launch the application so you could meet up with them there.
Services like Dodgeball {hmm ? se below} already let you do something like this locally and in text, but I’d love to see something that was global, graphic and virtual world-enabled. I pondered this the other day while looking in Google Earth at a few of the places I used to live. I wanted to find the house of an old friend in California, but I didn’t know where he lived. So I thought, What if I could just type his name into the search box and the app would zoom into either his house or his current location, depending on the preferences he’d set? How cool would that be?
This is a service you’d definitely want to be able to opt out of or turn off, but I think it could create some very powerful connections for those who cared to use it.

What you’d essentially be doing is creating an online profile that could be used to connect you to other people in a variety of online contexts. Depending on how much information you wanted to share with which groups, you might need several different profiles — for example, you might have one for Eve Online, not connected to your RL details, and one for everything else. The ability to tag other people’s profiles could also open up interesting possibilities.
I think this comes to my mind now because, with the profileration of social software sites, we’re beginning to move away from the current model, in which our presence online is primarily connected to and defined by a URL or email address. Increasingly, at sites such as MySpace and in other social networks, we’re representing ourselves as ourselves. In the future — and not too far off, I’d wager — our online presence will take the form of some kind of simple “identity entity,” if you will, a set of data that defines a particular profile. At the moment, we don’t have a good definition of what that data set will look like. We use email addresses and passwords to log into eCommerce sites, toon names and passwords to log into virtual worlds, email addresses and URLs to comment on blogs, other identifiers to go other places. A lot of people have been trying to solve this problem recently. The most high-profile effort is the Identity Metasystem being developed by Kim Cameron at Microsoft, but there are many more as well.

{Dodgeball -
What is it? [ top ]
dodgeball.com is a new social networking site built specifically for mobile phones.
How much does dodgeball cost? [ top ]
We don't charge you anything for the service, though your cell phone carrier may charge you to send or receive text messages depending on the plan you have with them. Picture messages are a different story... some providers charge upwards of $0.25 per message.
What does it do? Give me an example. [ top ]
The idea is simple: tell us where you are and we'll tell you who and what is around you. We'll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.
What kind of things can I do with dodgeball? What are the different messages I can send? [ top ]
Below are some of the things you can do with dodgeball.com using our 3 main commands (@ ! ?). (Make sure you send them to nyc@dodgeball.com)
CHECKIN-IN (@) -> to broadcast your whereabouts to your friendsSend us: @Bar 74Your friends get: "Ryan is at Bar 74. Stop by and say hi!"
SHOUT (!) -> to broadcast a message to your friends Send us: ! anyone want to go to the movies?Your friends get: "Ryan says: anyone want to go to the movies?"
LOOKUP (?) -> to lookup the address / cross street of a bar or restaurant Send us: Bar 74?You get: "Bar 74 is located at 7443 E. 6th Avenue in Phoenix, AZ."
All you need to remember is:
@ = check in ; ! = shout ; ? = information
Can other people see my history? [ top ]
Don't worry - your secrets are safe with us. We're providing the History view so you can have a little diary of your dodgeball social experience. If we ever do make it possible to share your history with your friends, we'll always allow you to opt out.