On Sunday at Wordcamp, Dave Winer chatted entertainingly about “The past, present and future of Web publishing,” and pointed toward a handful of areas where the Web needs some hard work.

One is “future-proofing” our blogs and other content. If, as several speakers at Wordcamp argued, the stuff we’re writing today –even the most ephemeral stuff — is going to provide a window onto our era for future generations, what can we do to insure that it will survive, in a world where file formats and physical media have a short shelf-life? No answers here, but it’s a criticial question.

The other need Winer pointed to was an open identity system — a repository for simple account information that different Web services can rely on so you don’t have to leave your identity scattered across a billion different sites. A lot of people are talking about Facebook in these terms, but that seems hugely premature, since today Facebook’s idea of “openness” is strictly one-way (it’s the roach-motel approach — data can check into the Facebook world but it can’t leave very easily). There have been lots of long-simmering discussions and slowly bootstrapping formats in this area, including OpenID, but none has yet achieved critical mass.

Winer suggested that Twitter’s open API offers a potential path toward such a system, one that he’s already experimented with via his Twittergram project. On the one hand, he said, it would help if some company that already had a vast pool of registered users would open up their service; on the other hand, he noted, the big companies — Yahoo, Microsoft, Google — best positioned to do this are the least likely to make such a move.

I wonder, though, whether we might ultimately end up with the long-dreamed-of identity system as a by-product of some company’s loss in the big Web wars of the late 2000s. Think back a decade: the reason we have a great open-source browser platform is that Netscape got trounced in the commercial battle by Microsoft, and, with little left to lose, decided to release its code for free. It took more than half a decade after that for Firefox to emerge in its present form, but now it’s a central piece of any open Web infrastructure.

I think it’s possible that, over the next few years, if we end up with a social-web business battle that, say, Yahoo or even Microsoft feels that they can’t win under current rules, a big company might decide to make its identity system truly open — or somehow merge it with an already-evolving open-source approach to the problem. As Winer said, that could be a game-changing move — one, I’d argue, as significant as the release of the Netscape code. It won’t change things overnight, but in 5 or 10 years we might end up with the useful system Winer outlined.

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