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Vitamins, Pain-killers, and Viagra
Dick
Hardt (click to enlarge) |
Dick Hardt intro’d a panel on identity at big sites (meaning eBay, Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and so on). He used a great analogy of vitamins, pain-killers, and Viagra. We’ve been selling ID Management as vitamins. Everyone knows that they’re good for you, but there’s no urgency. With pain-killers, there’s urgency. Viagra, on the other hand lets people do things they couldn’t do before. User-centric identity is a pain-killer for users, but only a vitamin for big sites.
How do you turn user centric identity into Viagra? He uses eBay as an example. By using a user-centric, federated identity system, they could allow other sites to use their reputation system and charge for the privilege. That’s a good example of enabling behavior from shared identity.
Posted by windley on September 11, 2006 5:57 PM



Comment from Chris at September 12, 2006 9:49 AM
Last week my brother tried to make a $25K payment to someone's Paypal account. Because of the size of the payment, the transaction was immediately flagged by my brother's credit card company. He had to call them and explain what he was trying to do. After he verified to them that he was the owner of the card, they cleared the flag, allowing the transaction to occur. However, Paypal's system would not allow the transaction to occur even though my brother had approved of the transaction on _his_ card. The explaination from Paypal was that they do not know what triggers their fraud detection system, but if it denies a transaction there is nothing they can do. No amount of "let me talk to your supervisor," cleared the way for the transaction to take place.
Seems to me that a little sharing of information here could have greatly simplified things for everyone involved. As it were, it took multiple transactions over multiple days to make the full payment.
Comment from atreh at March 6, 2007 4:14 AM
http://arnduk.100webspace.net/091dca.html
Comment from Aron at March 6, 2007 4:16 AM
hi all
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