If the online world has become a real world (cldwrld) with digital countries then where are the passports?

The challenge is what to include in a virtual passport issued by a digital country (login to another [Personal] Cloud-based application – which is so cumbersome I am just going to call it a pCBA and be done with it – with the first’s username/password combination).

Facebook Connect includes a lot of information and twitter relatively little (except of course the twitter password which seems to me to be odd).

Facebook has just officially announced its new privacy tools and had a brush with Canada and maybe that will spill over into a a discussion of Facebook Connect.

In the meantime I like the idea drawn from the virtual world (cldwrld is not a virtual world but a companion world populated by Real People – Digital Inhabitants) given in Comment 2 by “Ananda” in this post (from 2007).

Translated into the Cloud-based environment it would provide for a central “passport registry” for Digital Inhabitants who want to sign into different pCBAs. Which would be pretty cool I think.

p.s. I wanted to contact “Ananda” for permission to include the comments in this post, but the link went nowhere. Which just goes to show that cldwrld is not only 2D, cool, flat and crowding but part of the time a mirage.

UPDATE 12/07/09 – An example of “virtual passports” in action, from the cnet news blog DEEPTECH. The only question now is identity verification. To my knowledge only twitter does that for certain accounts where proof of identity is important. So it’s not yet available to your humble bod. like me.

But tie the fingerprint solution – like digitalPersona – to it and who knows?