Lifestrea.ms is supposed to pull together all your different online activities into one place – I’m writing this blog post from within Lifestrea.ms, and I just posted to twitter from here too.

There’s lots more to Lifestrea.ms – openID integration, cool attention stuff, rss reading and so on.  I’ll post some more once I’ve played around

He also has a slide show about OpenID and education, in which he says:

Far from threatening institutional viability and control, distributed, user-owned technology offers an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, and bureaucracy that come from a supply-driven model. Rather than spinning us out of control, they offer a way to get back under control.

Oh yes!

As Wikipedia puts it:

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID “identity provider” (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

Have you got yours yet? If you use AOL or have a blog at Wordpress then you have one already! Otherwise, get one here. I’m http://robertjones.myopenid.com and have also set up this blog to act as my OpenID, following Sam Ruby’s instructions here.

OpenID has a good chance of becoming one of the key elements of a truly open, distributed social network that will render MySpace and Facebook as redundant as Friendster is now. The big fuss about OpenSocial from Google highlighted how clearly people see the need for such a development.