WRITTEN ON September 30th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Identity, Save Time and Money, What do we want?
The toolkit for online co-creation needs to include public service data and interfaces to programmes that do useful things. For example, Yahoo offers the API to its authentication and account base – the one which also does flickr.* Does Yahoo ID offer a quick win for some simple government services. Not for welfare or travel, but how about for booking a tennis court or GP appointment, or submitting photos of service quality issues (the street lamp on at midday, the paving stone, the flytipping?
The rule with “Quick wins” is: be aware of them, use them where appropriate, don’t reinvent the wheel. * thx to idworkshop
4 Responses to “Yahoo ID: easy, cheap and available. But how useful?”
Recently, I made a disastrous attempt to find a replacement NHS dentist: Official NHS web-sites and phone lines failed to provide much of the information necessary, in a usable form; Unfortunately, I chose a fully qualified but incompetent NHS dentist who wrecked my tooth and triggered other health problems.
The patient-facing part of the NHS’s brand new “Choose & Book” facility seems to suffer from similar faults.
The government promotes “choice” but we have to choose health-care, schools or university courses using less useful information than we’d get when buying a book or a cheap holiday on the Internet?
Co-creation and web 2.0 techniques could transform the usefulness of these government services, at low cost.
Sandy Walsh of nCipher begs to differ:
Whoa … no thank you.
Froma paranoid users perspective I wouldn’t go near this functionality with a 10′ pole.
I have a lot of my personal information on Yahoo. All my RSS feeds, my email, my stock watch list. This sounds like a great opportunity for phishing sites to jump right in for a man-in-the-middle attack. The only faith I have right now with using yahoo is that I can type into my browser http://www.yahoo.com and go their directly, and even then I’m paranoid that I’m really getting the right site. If I go to “Fred’s Blog” and need to authenticate to Yahoo so I can enter a comment … not a chance. I’d much rather use something less risky like an OpenID url or (what I do today) use pookmail, mailinator or bugmenot.
“Federating the silos” is just going to make it more of a haven for phishing attacks.
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Surely, Tony’s triple-biometric ID card is being introduced specifically to stop “health tourists” (and/or *suspected* terrorists) from booking appointments with GPs?
(At last week’s party conference, John Read got a great cheer when he announced that *suspected* terrorists deserve fewer rights.)