March 16th, 2008
Feudalism 2.0 (or serfing the web)
by Tony Haile | 
24 Comments
It took Europe 800 years to break the stranglehold of the feudal system, and the social networks six years to bring it back.
The feudal system gave Europeans their identity: you were a landowner or you were a serf. One was more fun than the other. Serfs were bound to the land, without freedom of movement. Their homes and belongings were property of the feudal lord and their labors lined someone else’s pocket. A serf could escape, but they would have to leave with nothing, never to see families and friends again. The barriers to freedom were intentionally high.
In the last few years the online world has seen the rise of personal identity. We are no longer just pistonheaddave or topcattone, anonymous monikers for flaming or gaming; we are Dave Morris or Tony Haile, we Google others and expect to be Googled, our flirting and romance is just as likely to take place online as it is in a bar. There are people whose perception of who I am is governed 20% by a shared flight and 80% by my facebook page. However, these identities that define us so much are bound to the company in whose site they were created, just as serfs were bound to the land in which they were born. We own nothing and if we leave we leave with nothing. Welcome to feudalism 2.0.
I don’t have the freedom to move the facets that make up my online self from Facebook to LinkedIn or Myspace, my content and relationships are the property of Facebook, as are the words exchanged with friends; I can’t message my Myspace friends from Facebook. My content is their content, my relationships are their relationships and my communications are their communications. I can escape and start a new life somewhere else, but if I do I do so faceless, barren and alone. My identity becomes fragmented as I move from site to site hemorrhaging the words, photos, messages and relationships that make up so much of my identity online. Old friends communicate with the ghosts of profiles past, not knowing that I have slipped away and begun (again) with nothing.
I don’t want to be too quick to judge the social networks, they have every right to do what they do, and we wouldn’t use them if they didn’t provide a valuable service. Going further, many would say that this post is a story about a pain that simply isn’t there. Most seem not to mind that who they are is owned by Mark Zuckerberg or Rupert Murdoch. However, might it be that, like the serf whose horizons did not extend beyond the fields his father tilled, we’ve not yet been able to conceive of anything better?
We need an Enlightenment online. An evolution of personal identity that says I’m free to throw sheep at people on Facebook or explore new bands on Myspace, but my content, my contacts, and my communications are in my control not theirs. I want people to be able to connect and interact with me through one unique identifier that doesn’t change, no matter where I choose to host my identity. I want to own my identity, I’m tired of being owned.
A group of us have started Chi.mp to try and jump-start this evolution of identity. We are building a Content Hub and Identity Management Platform that can be deployed on any domain and puts the individual in control of their own identity. People using Chi.mp will have identities that are importable, exportable, interoperable, portable and most importantly theirs. By deploying it on the domain of your choice you can move from Chi.mp to another identity provider without losing the unique signifier that represents you. Oh and if you don’t have your own domain we’ll give you one (like everything else) for free. We’re turning the social networks inside out and making the Internet the Platform again.
This blog is an opportunity for some of us within the team, in particular Josh Porter, Brian Oberkirch, Myles Weissleder and myself, to delve into the area of identity online and engage with those who are interested in domain-centric identity and Chi.mp. After all, persistent identity online is the opposable thumb of the Internet; hopefully now we can all catch on. . .
[...] der Erste war für mich superinteressant, deswegen möchte ich ihn hier weiterempfehlen: In “Feudalism 2.0 (or serfing the web)” beschäftigt sich Tony Haile mit der Frage wem die angehäuften Profildaten, Freundeskreis, [...]
[...] persistent identity online is the opposable thumb of the Internet tagged found on 03/29/08 11:50 am | [...]
I’m really interested to see how Chi.mp develops. The “deployed on any domain” idea sounds like it may be the answer to something I’m increasingly concerned with: managing my streams of digital information, and the amount of control involved in hosting own domain vs using platforms.
[Side note; it would be much easier to follow the conversation here if feeds were full content -- is there a reason you are choosing not to do that?]
@jspad Feeds should be full content, I’ll look into it!
This is a brilliant article - thanks. I’ve also been thinking about this topic for a while, so I’m pleased to have found some like minded folk. Will be following chi.mp and this site with interest.
Thanks Cath, I’ll be popping down to Brighton sometime soon I hope and giving a little sneak preview of chi.mp. Hope to see you then!
So will this service seamlessly provide OpenID and/or OAuth support as well? I’d hate to see it needlessly try to replace something that works quite well for its purpose. Obviously chi.mp aims to provide more than those, in order to manage contacts and photos and whatnot, but if it’s built on other standards, so much the better.
I have plenty of other questions, but there’s little sense asking details until there’s something more formal being presented. Looks good so far though, keep it up!
@Marty Thanks for the positive words! Short answer, yes; we’re not looking to reinvent the wheel, but use whatever standards are available to advance not just Chi.mp but the movement as a whole.
OpenID, Oauth and microformats are some of the building blocks of what we are doing and we hope that we will be able to incentivise other sites to employ them too.
oooh - that would be great - please do let me know!
Hey guys, looking forward to reading more on here!
Just wondering — would it be possible to change your RSS settings so that you’re publishing each entire article? Right now I’m only getting up to the Serfs sentence on this article, for example. Thanks for considering!
Hi Meredith,
Thanks for stopping by! The RSS has been a little buggy for some reason but we think we have fixed it now, please drop me a comment if you aren’t getting full feeds in future.
[...] der Erste war für mich superinteressant, deswegen möchte ich ihn hier weiterempfehlen: In “Feudalism 2.0 (or serfing the web)” beschäftigt sich Tony Haile mit der Frage wem die angehäuften Profildaten, Freundeskreis, [...]
Considering your lamenting about openness, how come your RSS feeds are only abstracts? Need some hits on the website, eh?
Hi Tony,
Unfortunately things appear to still be the same — I even refreshed in Google Reader to be sure.
Meredith
Joseph and Meredith
I’m a bit stumped why this is continuing to be the case, the RSS is set to be full content in the admin and the bug we thought was doing it apparently isn’t the root cause. I’m going to dig around a bit and get Josh on the case. I’m really sorry, I know how frustrating it is to have to click through.
Hi guys,
I have been assured that now the RSS issue has been fixed. I’m keeping all appendages crossed that this will turn out to be the case!
Yup, all better now! Thanks for fixing things up, Tony
[...] ownyouridentity.com - Feudalism 2.0 (or serving the the web) [...]
[...] Your Identity is the blog-face of Ch.imp (Content Hub and Identity Management Platform), which is described in this post. I love the concept, a decentralized identity hub that you install on your [...]
[...] Feudalism 2.0, and share your thoughts via the tumblelog you created for Blog Post 1. After you’ve written [...]
This sounds a lot like what Marc Canter did with People Aggregator 2 years ago. Besides the obvious differences in technology available two years ago and now, would you care to compare and contrast how chi.mp is different from People Aggregator? This also seems similar to Ringside Network social application platform, even though they only support Facebook now, there are plans to add support for openID and OAuth. To a lesser extent, it’s what OpenSocial is doing also except that OpenSocial has no persistent server presence but they are moving fast and furious to add RESTful and OAuth support. If you can share your thoughts on these other solutions vs. Chi.mp, that would be great.
Hey Bob!
So PeopleAggregator and Ringside Network are essentially white-label social network providers. If you have a site they can install a social network on it.
Chi.mp is a completely different premise, we’re creating a network of identities between sites rather than within any one site. You don’t host a social network on your domain, you host ‘you’ and that representation of your identity connects to other people on other sites. We’re making the Internet the platform again.
By making the domain the central identifier for your online life and by committing to being open and interoperable, someone can have their profile on jim.mp and connect that in a social network with jane.com. What’s more if you decide you don’t like the chi.mp system powering your domain, you can export everything to some other provider. You stay in control of who you are, not any one service provider.
hope that helps
I get it, a rather novel and interesting idea. Any plans to open source this and / or allow other developers to participate?
[...] further leads me to Chi.mp’s blog, ownyouridentity.com. At first glance, the first post Feudalism 2.0 (or serfing the web) gave me pause for “seriously, another social network? [...]