I am proud to announce that today we have launched the project MyProfile, as part of my PhD thesis at TELECOM SudParis.
MyProfile intends to provide a solution for managing the numerous accounts and profiles that users have on the Internet. Its main purpose is to provide a unified user account, or simply ‘user profile’, which as opposed to current ‘silo’ profiles, would really be under the user’s control, on a device controlled by the user — possibly a plug computer.
The problem right now is that the Web we know is based on centralized resources, using the so called ‘silo’ approach. Offering particular services would usually involve having to create dedicated accounts for each user, tying and limiting the user to this particular service and/or resource. Furthermore, users have no control over how their personal account data are used by the service. Recently there have been numerous cases where social networks have made public certain private details of their users (see Facebook and Google Buzz), which made people realize the importance of online privacy and public data control.
If you want to find out more, check http://myprofile-project.org or the project’s manifesto.
WebIDauth Project