Mary Ruddy is speaking on Use Cases for the Social Web. Our hope is that by discussing use cases, we can lay a foundation for later discussion and give everyone a common frame of reference. Mary makes the point that use cases are stories. Keeping the discussion about stories helps people from different technology backgrounds to relate.

Use cases: SSO, social commerce (Doc's example or recommender's, reviewers, and affiliates), augmented social networks, Katrina networking (lost and found people), soccer registration, Internet banking authentication, health care, etc. Question: can we move beyond authentication?

Mary makes an interesting point that we want to know about people who recommend things to us because who they are matters in our level of trust in the recommendation. A simple example: when someone recommend a hotel, it's useful to know if they paid for it themselves or they were on an expense account.

Rohit Khare raises the question of anti-use cases. Often we over identify people. User preventable identity linking, sharing, and forwarding. These are more circumstances that are common to every use case. An interesting link to yesterday's post on identity and presence is that the laws governing what can happen to your identity have to do with presence.

Persistence identity and reputation are pillars of building a community. Introduction is a key part as well. Reputation brokers for relying parties that move between systems. Without trusted third parties, the community won't scale.