342 "Identities"

I ended this week with a total of 342 Internet identities (7 more since 8/25). I count any site that requires a username and password credential as an "Internet identity" (others might call these "Identity Silos", but I think of them as distinct instances of my identity). One would think that given I have so many identities, I wouldn't need to create new ones all that frequently, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The new identities created this over the past month include:

• zdnet - I was forced to create an identity here in order to respond to a blog entry on zdnet (they would not allow anonymous response, nor take the typical minimum information for blog entries). Of interest was that creating an account there required name, address, industry, company size, etc., etc. Of course, I filled this in with junk (I hate sites that require unnecessary ifnoramtion). Interestingly, they alwo required zip code even though they said it was only required for US & Canada (I had selected Bangladesh as my country). And, of course, every time I made an error in completing the form, they reset my subscription selections back to getting all kinds of spam so that if I didn't unselect them again I would be added to the lists of spam drones.

  Finally, the email addreessed had to be confirmed before I could post and upon confirmation, they again somehow thought I had subscribed to a bunch of email subscriptions, even though I purposefully de-selected all of the subscription checkboxes (several times).

  Definately NOT the kind of experience those in the identity world are driving towards (including, interestingly, the author whos blog I was responding to).

• ios.winkley.com - so I could participate in a wiki
• academic superstore - to make a purchase
• axiontech.com - where I purchased the drive I wrote about in "160 of them bad boys". they had interesting password rules, only allowing lower cace alphabetic characters, 0-0 and '_'.
• dev.java.net - to join opensso (so I can get a free T-Shirt :-))
• alert.loudoun.gov - to get alerts about local school delays/closings (they changed their system and did not migrate over the old system, nor did they close the accounts on the old system which is a public system and continues to exist for other school systems)

At some point one would think that I will reach the point of saturation (I will have an identity at every possible place I would use), but that doesn't appear to be the case (yet) as I'm still creating close to 2 every week and I'm not counting things that are of temporary use (like the ID's I received for internet access while at a conference in Paris)

Tags : identity / account