instead of emails and passworded authentications, everyone has a user identity just like a social security number that can be used on any of the plethora of online chat communities, payments for things (bitcoin paypal cc), or personal blog posts.<p>maybe the same for business:// or place:// since the internet is like this hive mind that should have all our useful data categorized well. but URLS are awful at logical categorization since there is no predictable standard patterns -- thats why google's the defacto gateway to the internet
This is an awful idea. It's an Internet version of a Social Security Number (which itself is heavily criticized).<p>First, anonymity is a useful tool on the Internet, even for non-criminals. It helps protect you against criminals, governments, corporations, and other entities who may want to globally identify and track you.<p>Second, all a bad guy needs is a single credential and he's got access to everything of yours, from your banking, to your spanking (porn memberships), to dating sites, to family pictures, email, etc. I don't know about you, but I have separate credentials for <i>everything</i> and beyond that, I like to maintain separate personas between my work and personal life, and heck, <i>even facets of my personal life</i>.<p>There are opt-in sort of things for this that largely meet your desires, such as Open ID or your Facebook login. What about those don't work for you?
I agree. Doing so would definitely make it much easier for the FBI to track criminals, right? And sociopaths - no longer would a low level detective require a search warrant to take an arrestee's computer to create a lineage of every action they've performed; now the detective could do so from his own laptop just by typing in the user id. And civil attorneys who used to have to have a warrant to get a doctor's computer records would now no longer need such a thing to show that the doctor's Google search terms clearly show a poor education/malpractice. This would certainly lead to a safer internet and probably eliminate crime on the web all together.<p>That's what you mean, right?
That initial field you're stepping on is protocol; it doesn't make any sense to overload it with entity type. You could define an entirely different standard where entity-type is first, but in that case don't mimic the look of URLs as it will only lead to confusion.<p>Regarding giving each individual a unique URL, that's the idea behind OpenId.