Been a long time since my last post. Indeed, it has been a long time since I did much more electronically than check my email and spend some late night hours hanging out with my Alea Iacta Est buds in WoW. Why is that, you may ask? My wife and I in the last 8 weeks have:
- Found a fabulous house we decided we needed to make all best efforts to acquire while the real estate market has everything “for” sale, “on” sale.
- Outbid 2 others that felt nearly as strongly about the house as we did.
- Arrange for financing and all that red tape stuff.
- Prepped our house for sale by clearing out of our basement and other sundry clutter that has gathered over the past 9 years. This took a disturbing portion of two weeks and completely consumed two weekends ferrying stuff to the curb or to two storage sheds.
- Put our house on the market and praise God, got it under not just one, but two contracts!
- Closed on the new house and spent the past 10 days moving all our stuff across town. Big thanks to my parents for visiting and helping out!
- Started a new consulting gig on Monday with travel involved. I’m typing this from the road.
Consequently, my digital lifestyle has been seriously impacted and I’ve (gasp) had to live almost entirely in the real world! This is actually a bit distressing given how much I was forced to accomplish offline that could have been done more expediently online. Sure, moving furniture will likely be a real world activity for a long time to come, but there’s certainly a lot that could have been done online.
One bright spot was finding and listing our house. We found our house along with a dozen or so other candidates via various MLS listing searches. All of those that walked through our house found us online as well. That’s where the glory ended. All the contract negotiating, banking, closing, etc. happened via actual paper and faxes! I am astounded at the number of fax machines that apparently live and thrive out in the wild. As frustrating as it was to deal with that fact given I have no fax machine and communicate purely via email, IM and other electronic means, I guess I can understand why these processes continue to be so paper and fax driven.
We continue to suffer without a decent online identity infrastructure! (You had to see that one coming.) I dealt with several banks, my realtor agent selling my house and representing me in my purchase, the realtor of those selling the house I wanted to buy, the realtors of those wishing to buy my house and the various closing attorneys. None of these entities issue credentials online that are of more than marketing value to themselves. None of them offered any online services to facilitate the routing and signing of the myriad documents that instead were faxed, copied, scanned and dealt with in often barely legible fashion.
This certainly isn’t because such services and technologies exist. Yet no one has put together the right technology in a properly packaged product that would stand up to the security and usability and trust challenges that I freely admit exist. OpenID could be a part of such a solution; Information Cards could be a part of such a solution; practical PKI could be a part of such a solution; federation functionality could be a part of such a solution, etc.; etc.. Indeed they all probably should be part of such a solution and I know I’m not the only one that sees that.
Yet where are the solutions? Are the potential players, specifications, startups, thought leaders, etc. thinking too big and waiting till they can do it all or; shooting too low and offering up slightly interesting, but not-ready-for-power-apps services?
