An admittedly-rumor-based-but-still-thought-provoking post from John McCrea:

…a source who-shall-go-un-named shared with me that Facebook has just quietly launched a “single sign on” initiative designed to put them in position of de facto cross-site identity monopolist.

I’ve been saying for awhile that MySpace could get-back to relevancy if they became an OpenID provider.  Not much of a surprise that Facebook would be working on the same thing (they’re smart) … and not much of a surprise that they would take a proprietary approach (worked pretty well so far) …

The only prediction I want to make is that the name for their single-sign-on service will notbe something the tech community currently uses (’single-sign-on’ and anything with ‘identity’ are out).  Facebook changed ’social network’ to ’social graph,’ ‘blogs’ to ‘Notes’, a ‘website’ to ‘Pages’ … maybe they’ll just call it ‘Sign On’?  Or just ‘Login’?  Place your bets.

And on the you-own-your-identity-data-side, there’s also lots of action …

I’m almost through Dive Into Python and came across this gem today:

I resisted list comprehensions when I first learned Python, and I resisted filter and map even longer. I insisted on making my life more difficult, sticking to the familiar way of for loops and if statements and step−by−step code−centric programming. And my Python programs looked a lot like Visual Basic programs, detailing every step of every operation in every function. And they had all the same types of little problems and obscure bugs. And it was all pointless.

Let it all go. Busywork code is not important. Data is important. And data is not difficult. It’s only data. If you have too much, filter it. If it’s not what you want, map it. Focus on the data; leave the busywork behind.

I definitely have the same inclinations and am glad he brings it up so directly.  In fact, the entire book has a refreshingly direct tone; I highly recommend it.

While the 3 technologies I just mentioned for portable social graphs are important, they don’t compare to the 10 Ways the World Might End, a TED talk by Stephen Petranek. 

Number 10: We lose the will to survive.
Number 1: Earth is hit by an asteroid.
(I’ll let you watch to get the rest. BTW, I recommend downloading the video to desktop.)

Number 10 seems unlikely … the Darwinian instinct to survive is too basic to filter out over generations.

Number 1 does sound a bit more likely now that I know a civilization-ending asteroid missed Earth by six hours.  Yikes.  Spend more money finding asteroids, NASA!

And RE: spending more money: The speaker’s solution to all of these problems was more government funding.  Personally, I generally prefer private foundations and donations funding such activities, since I believe those groups have more incentive to spend wisely and get a bigger social ROI.  However, in the case of terraforming mars (to protect against solar flares) — which would be a 300-500 year project — could a private foundation foot the bill?

I hope so … because very few governments (nor the tax-paying citizens) are forward-looking enough to fund a project that will affect their great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren.  Heck, we don’t even care about balancing the budget today, let alone 10, 20, or 500 years out.  Politically, it’d be infeasible to give up current pleasures for such long-range problems.  I’ll call it longterm-apathy, but there’s probably a better term.