Skype is sitting out the web’s identity war

More than 500 million people have Skype names but they only use them to sign in to Skype. Meanwhile Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, MySpace and LinkedIn provide portable identity to their customers. The chart is courtesy of a Gigya.com report on multiple identity services.

Identity providers offer:

• Registration.
• Authentication for login.
• Data sharing.

People are more likely to use existing accounts than to create account new ones. A "Register with Facebook" button, for example, transfers trust to the new site and lowers the effort to explore it. Site operators love the higher conversion rate since more people sign up.

Once you’ve registered using a trusted authority, the new site doesn’t need to worry about your changing passwords or your profile. Your trusted authority, like Google or LinkedIn, knows your latest account information and takes care of authorizing you.

Your identity provider can also share your data with other sites. Different providers choose different data to share.

They commonly share your proper name, email, nickname, bio photo, profile URL, birthday, gender, location and a list of your contacts (your social graph in socialmedia speak).

Skype would be able to share most of those fields and more. Skype’s data model also offers mood message (like a tweet that lasts), primary language, time zone, and availability. Skype also has phone numbers (the ones where you forward SkypeIn call), online numbers (where you call and Skype rings) and Skype names.

Skype is missing a vast opportunity. Being an OpenID and OAuth provider reinforces your brand during more of each customer’s day, in more ways. It provides valuable behavioral data. It helps customers choose their primary trustee for their profile data, their contacts and friends, their media, and their conversation history.

Skype is rolling out their platform products starting with SkypeKit and continuing toward Communications as a Platform. "Sign In With Skype" could be great bait for Skype’s developer program.

Unfortunately, Skype’s identity model is soooo last century.

• IDs cannot be transferred.
• You cannot have multiple personas for each identity.
• You cannot present different profiles to different parts of your social graph (a family face versus a work face).
• Pricing and contracts are tied to user accounts, so Skype forces you to break your life into work and non-work, which is not how people communicate today.
• Skype never provided any APIs for account creation, change, transfer or deletion, so enterprises cannot automate account provisioning and manage the lifecycle.
• Skype manager, a control panel for supervisors, doesn’t offer an API for managing funds.
• Skype doesn’t model roles which might be shared among multiple Skype names, so inbound calls go to a pool of users to answer the call.

Some of these defects are structural, requiring serious reengineering. Other fixes would be additive, feasible within a few quarters.

Skype has a chance to build its identity technology, bring it to market, to win hearts and minds. Is it on Skype’s roadmap?

Updated: 10 July 2010: Added "Sign In With Skype" button mockup