{"id":1300,"date":"2011-01-27T12:31:31","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T19:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2011-03-04T13:33:43","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T20:33:43","slug":"facebook-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2011\/01\/27\/facebook-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook people"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via @radar O&#8217;Reilly, <a title=\"Facebook integration for Netflix\" href=\"http:\/\/networkeffect.allthingsd.com\/20110127\/netflix-gets-social-extensive-facebook-integration-is-coming\/\">news<\/a> that Netflix is going to deeply integrate Facebook into its authentication system, at least. \u00a0Specifically, they&#8217;re going to use Facebook accounts to identify individuals in households. \u00a0This makes sense: when Netflix was mailing DVDs, the relevant unit was mailing address or household. \u00a0But since they&#8217;re fulfilling the promise of their name (they weren&#8217;t called Mailflix before), the relevant unit for streaming is, arguably, the individual.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So they&#8217;re going to identify people in households. \u00a0But how do you do that?<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve noted <a title=\"Facebook identifies people\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/08\/04\/facebook-connect-real-people\/\">before<\/a> (well, it was Dick Hardt&#8217;s idea), Facebook is unique in the business of authentication because Facebook users are real people. \u00a0That is, Facebook uses the &#8216;social graph&#8217; to make sure that accounts are associated with real and, importantly, unique individuals. \u00a0(Some people might have multiple Facebook accounts, but that is a pretty sketchy set of people.)<\/p>\n<p>When you register for an account on another system, the distinguishing measure is email address; for most of the web, email <strong>is<\/strong> identity. \u00a0But this isn&#8217;t enough for what Netflix is looking for, and for lots of other applications. \u00a0Federating identity, also in the <a title=\"White House internet identity plan\" href=\"http:\/\/www.webpronews.com\/topnews\/2011\/01\/14\/googles-open-web-advocate-talks-white-house-web-id-plan\">news<\/a> recently, doesn&#8217;t cleanly solve this problem. \u00a0And there is plenty of <a title=\"37 Signals ends support for OpenID\" href=\"http:\/\/www.janrain.com\/blogs\/janrains-take-37signals-decision-remove-openid-login\">talk<\/a> about how OpenID, specifically, is <a title=\"Open ID is a nightmare\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.wekeroad.com\/thoughts\/open-id-is-a-party-that-happened\">failing<\/a> in its promise; the architecture may be right but the implementation is flawed.<\/p>\n<p>So even though I have <a title=\"Gawker nails Facebook\" href=\"http:\/\/tv.gawker.com\/5512185\/south-park-explains-everything-that-is-annoying-about-facebook\">some<\/a> <a title=\"Facebook integration\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2010\/05\/31\/rolling-stones-good-facebook-bad\/\">issues<\/a> with Facebook integration, it seems that they might be onto something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via @radar O&#8217;Reilly, news that Netflix is going to deeply integrate Facebook into its authentication system, at least. \u00a0Specifically, they&#8217;re going to use Facebook accounts to identify individuals in households. \u00a0This makes sense: when Netflix was mailing DVDs, the relevant &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2011\/01\/27\/facebook-people\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-kY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1320,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions\/1320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}