Microcontent Musings follow up the “10 things to Watch” from Marc Canter.

Personally I suspect that the real play is in 1. Identity (“Who are you”) and 2. Attention (“Hey there, Ian”). Pretty much everything else seems to fall out from those two. Particularly once you accept that objects/things will need a validated Identity just as surely as you and me.

Now that the last part of this article (“Breaking the Web Wide Open”) by Marc Canter is up, I decided to comment it here.

I like the intro and his comments on walled gardens. It is about time that things open up a bit more and thus the article has a great title. Marc Canter sees 10 developments that are important in the future. One might even add the connotation Web 2.0, but that is starting to get lame.

Identity: This is a very complex subject and ranges from single sign on, to profiles and attention. The problem is the combination of all these things. Profiles imply structure (and thus MicroContent). Profiles can be become extremely complex. There is a relation with access to this profiles: who may see what and for how long? And then there is the single sign on part. It is time we had some progress here. Since W3C worked on it (forgot the name of that project), I did not see much happening. I like to see the owner of the profile in the centre. The owner should be the one who decided who gets to see what.

Attention: This stays an interesting thing. I think however that first the Identity-part should be solved. It will take a while before businesses can really use attention on an individual basis. They are still not able to use all my blogs and there is much information in it on me.