Twitter, the spine of the internet

The Internet is a messy affair. When you think about how it works – pictures and text are broken into tiny little packets of data and are passed between switches and routers and they all find their way to the place they’re destined for, it’s nothing short of black magic and it’s a wonder that it even works at all. It’s all spread out, with bits poking out here and there, it’s been modified over years, hacked, built in layers, different parties have come up with new standards while old standards have been left for dead in the web’s gutter. It’s a right mess. A big beautiful mess riddled with imperfection.

It was never intended to be a nervous system for humanity.

And because it’s such a massive and complex system that’s evolved over time, there are lots of ways in which it’s rubbish.

One big problem has always been that web sites you know and love don’t recognise you like your friends and family do. Without providing a username and password, websites can’t tell who the hell you are, you’re a number, if that. But web sites want you to come back, they want you to play with them regularly. Presumably they get lonely without you. After all, they exist only to be interacted with.

So websites cajole you into registering with them so you can sign in next time you visit. You’re promised an embarrassment of riches – newsletters, games, offers, exclusive content. How can you turn it down? But of course, most do. Most people really can’t be bothered registering or signing in to anywhere.

So stuff like OAuth and OpenID have been invented by super smart people to help websites recognise you wherever you go. They help you take your identity with you. But of course, we all know the Internet doesn’t like things that sounds like technologies. The Internet likes things that sound fun, names like Tweeble, Gotchoo or BlimBlam go down a treat. OAuth and OpenID are never going to be popular in their own right, just like the fact that digital civvies don’t want to know about RSS because it sounds more like something you might catch than something that helps you stay informed. It needs to be packaged into something very fun. And for single sign-on, Twitter is that package.

If you’re signed in to Twitter right now, take a look here at your connections. Listed there are all the sites and web services that you have given permission to access your account. When you go to their websites, providing you’re already logged in to Twitter, you can log in to their site with one single click. It seems to be becoming more and more popular for sites to connect with you through Twitter, use it to talk to you and allow you to log in with your account.

This allows you to centralise all the sites and services you want to use. Twitter then becomes the identity you take around with you wherever you go. A way to bind together everything and a way of websites understanding more about you.