David suggests that your identity belongs in the browser. It is already in there anyway. For any of us that browse, for the most part, from the same computer every single day – we take advantage of the browser’s ability to save our login information for tons of Web sites into its own data store. Or, sometimes (like with Mac OS X) into the system’s secure data store.

Either way, its there. Easy. You go to a site – it prefills the data you need to login, off you go. But what if the browser only needed to record one bit of information rather than all of these separate bits per site? Who you are. In the world of OpenID who you are is represented by an URL.

By the way, Hi, I’m http://cdevroe.com/ – Nice to meet you.

If the browser held that information, rather than the surfer needing to understand what that actually means – imagine the possibilities! Imagine this; you go to a Web site, Web site wants you to create an account, browser knows this, you just hit “Yes, I’ll have an account here at XYZ.com” and poof, you have an account. You don’t have a new username and password (though I’m sure said service will allow you to create a handle there, but you won’t need to remember that to log in again). Every single site on the Web would grow faster because of this. For better or worse.

I had the privilege of speaking to David last week on the phone about a matter having nothing to do with OpenID but I can say that from speaking with him that I enjoy his style of explaining things. It is simple and real. Others in the OpenID world are either extremely long winded or, and maybe this is just me being unwilling to sit through the boring lecture about things that do not interest me, they just seem to never get off their horse to talk to the people here on the ground.  David does not do this. He shows real examples, explains them in ways I can understand (and so could my Mom probably), and wraps it up in a post that even I have the attention span to read through.

Regardless of where this discussion goes – I like the idea, and I like that it will now be talked about.

One could sit back and try to analyze why this is happening; with Twitter as Pownce’s main “competitor” (whether justly so or not) and with Pownce having a reasonable amount of uptime problems – you could say this is a result of these two, or many other things.  But I’m less worried about the “why” and more interested in the “what’s next”?

That is why I asked Mike Malone, one of the Pownce team members that is moving to Six Apart, to answer two simple questions (which he was happy to do).

Leah said, in the blog post announcement, that “we’ll come back with something much better in 2009″ – Does this mean that Pownce will come back as a better service? Or, something completely different?

“It is going to come back as something “very cool and very different”. [...] Whether it will be called “Pownce” is to be determined.”

Pownce seems fairly active still. Is there any direct benefit to shutting the service down within two weeks?

“The benefit is basically that we can concentrate on the new projects we’re working on.”

After asking Mike to elaborate on the second answer, he stated that it is generally tough to keep Pownce up and running and takes up a lot of time.  Shutting the service helps them to free up their time in order to focus their efforts on getting, what they feel, is a really valuable new service up and running quicker than they could have without shutting Pownce down.

Pownce, although I really liked the service, never really made it into my daily stops insomuch as other services like Twitter, Brightkite, and FriendFeed have.  So I can’t say I’m particularly saddened about its being shut down.  However, I do look forward to Six Apart and the ex-Pownce team creating something new and exciting in the New Year that hopefully will be a more focused and stable product to use.

Thanks to Mike for answering my questions.