Vampire Identity: a Skype Red Software Design Challenge

Skype for Vampires offers the first Vampire-Ready Digital Identity System

Along with Skype for Vampires comes a new ID system, reflecting deep research into vampire market needs.

Multiple Pseudonyms, Persistent Identity. As you might imagine, vampires may wish to remain closeted. S4V now lets you define multiple aliases. You can apply aliases to individual contacts and contact groups. Your core digital identity should last as you shed aliases over the decades.

My Species. Each alias may have its own species indicators. You can choose from Human, Vampire, Dhampir, Werewolf, Pixie, Decline To State, BiteMe! We can only guess what  BiteMe! presence means.

Profile attribute: MyType™. Vampires can share their personal tastes using the common ABO blood group system (A, B, AB, O). Humans will be able to share their blood types in their profiles. You will be able to search the Skype directory for people according to MyType.

Real Vampire™. Is this contact really undead? Skype partnered with the American Vampire League to certify Skypers users as AVL members in good standing. Building on technologies like OpenID and OAuth, this is Skype's second use of third-party authentication after its MySpaceIM partnership. They are promoting VoID, the Vampires over Open ID protocol.

These features should also be useful to humans. We all want to share ourselves differently with different people, applying the appropriate social context. Your boss shouldn't know you hang out at vampire bars, your bloody friends shouldn't know you go to church, and your church committee shouldn't know how you voted. Skype now makes that possible.

See also:

• Your MySpaceIM account dies when you do. Skype Journal, 2007.
• WhoAmI - A Web2.0 Platform for Faceted Identity Management through Aggregation of Social Media. Stephan Baumann, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
• Faceted Id/entity: Managing representation in a digital world, danah boyd's thesis on contextualization of identity.

tags: skype, skypejournal, bloodtype, realvampire, mytype, myspecies, biteme, vampire, dhampir, werewolf, pixie, presence, aliases, facedtedidentity, identity, id, trublood, trueblood

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