Personalize me, PLEASE

I've been thinking a lot about personalization and what it means. It's been an incredible part of every product that I've worked on. And today, it still isn't true.

To personalize something, a user needs multiple ways to establish an account with a service. Then you need to trust that service to manage your profile. FOREVER. I've had a hard time discovering everything from apps to music to videos on all of my devices.

One should consider the challenges of personalization. The web needs a more federated and open way to identify a user. And that needs to apply to a lot more things now that the web is a lot more than Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Google Chrome, and more. It can personalize everything from apps to how we pay for things in stores to what ads we see on TV.

It's scary to think that one company would manage all of these things, but if all of the services out there would find a way to collaborate, my life in the digital age would be much more peaceful and productive.