Identity in the Metaverse
Who are you on the Internet? Are you someone different on every site that you visit, and is that a good thing or a bad thing?
One of the key things that should be resolved as part of moving to a new way of thinking about the Internet is that of authentication and Identity. A fairly basic form of this, called Oauth2 already exists, letting you use your login via Google, Facebook or a few other large sites to sign up for and access smaller sites. This requires a fair bit of integration and comes with some interesting tradeoffs. The good news is that the big authentication providers are probably more likely to keep your passwords safe and take reasonable efforts to protect your account that just aren’t possible from the hundreds of little sites that you want to access and that want to deal with authenticated users. The bad news is that if you do lose your primary account for some reason, now the entire internet has forgotten who you are, which isn’t a great outcome.
So the core goal here is to reduce friction in providing a personalized and authenticated experience wherever you go in the Internet/Metaverse, and it could be extended further if each of those sites can recognize you as being the same person as you cross sites, offering better ways to combine functionality between different providers. As the user you just need to make sure that you trust the company to keep providing this service and to provide it for you at a very high quality, both protecting your account and keeping up to date with whatever functionality may be necessary in the future. Identity is probably the most sticky technology on the internet because it forms the core of how you interact with every other service, and the idea of canceling or changing your identity provider is likely to be pretty horrible.
But moving further beyond “Oauth2 but better” there is a whole category of other services that would enable the Metaverse to be a much more personalized and personal experience. The two features that would fundamentally change the game are to provide what I’ll call a ‘briefcase’ and to maintain commonly available social and interest graphs.
The briefcase is the easy idea, having settings that come along as part of your identity, enabling each new service you connect with to be able to, with your permission, pull additional details about you. Imagine if your billing address and other personal information was just one additional click away from being shared with the new online florist or if your contact information for your friends was easy to pull in, but also secure enough that you only shared what you wanted, when you wanted, and it didn’t permanently reside with the new site, it stayed with our identity provider. Data like your clothing sizes, or your favorite pizza toppings could be just one click away. Think of this as an extreme version of auto-fill. And if you think the future is VR Avatars, what if you could bring yours along with you, or at least enough information so that each new app could start you off with something pretty close to your normal look, providing that additional level of consistency and low friction for trying out new things.
The more complicated idea is the Social or Interest graph, basically the map of all of the people you interact with and the things you are interested in, in a way that it could be broadly consumed by different applications, given your (hopefully explicit) permission, I’ll call this the MetaGraph (OpenGraph exists and is at least similar in concept). Think about Facebook/Meta, their most valuable asset is not just their users, but the knowledge of how their users interact with each other, as that provides the magical ingredient that keeps their product sticky and drives traffic to come back day after day. Any company that can create a way to do this in a format that can then be shared across applications will generate tremendous value for the Internet as a whole, but will have a challenge in re-capturing the value for themselves, which is why companies like Facebook and Twitter prefer a walled garden, it keeps the information private and keeps you close enough to advertise to. Having this become real will require either incredible boldness from an existing player, or a new entrant into the market that doesn’t risk cannibalizing their existing business.
The other challenge here is that aside from being technically complex to do, it is a fabulously expensive infrastructure to operate. For simplicity I’ll ignore the technical details, but this is the kind of data that would need to be accessed very frequently in order to personalize your online experience, while having the potential to be extremely expensive to serve, and by offering it outside of the walled garden the incentives for 3rd parties to write efficient code are also reduced. In terms of challenges, this is one of the most transformative ways to look at how the metaverse could be really different from the internet of today, a common format for both friend and interest graphs, enabling extreme levels of personalization across different sites.
The MetaGraph idea, aside from being hard to do, also offers risks to users of both exposing the total scope of your behavior to potentially less than well meaning actors, and it very intentionally would support an incredibly level of personalization. The risk here is that as we keep increasing personalization that people will keep finding stronger and stronger eco-chambers for their beliefs online, being surrounded only by the things that resonate most with them. Somewhat obviously, this is a bad thing to take to extremes as we need moderation and common experiences in order to help pull people together instead of driving them into the isolation of their own beliefs. On the other hand, it would be nice if when you joined a new game you could easily see what friends are already playing and reach out to them directly, or if when you entered a new online store it knew enough about you to surface things you might be interested in buying instead of giving you a generic experience and having to start from scratch.
My bet is that having a clear, secure and low friction identity is going to be one of the most transformative changes over the next 5 years and a key foundation for the Metaverse.
