Sigh...where to start?

First, I applaud your passion for making the web a better place, and for being willing to put yourself out there and be open with your views.

That said, there's a number of problems with what you're saying and the proposed solution, but let me point out just a few:

1. Normal people don't care. Seriously, my mom uses a handful of websites and doesn't really care about any of the problems you mention. If a solution were offered and it was more convenient, she might use it, but it's just not a big deal to her.

2. Identity and data centralization seem to offer a lot of security risks and the philosophical problem of putting all that data into the hands of one company, or even just a few companies. Making an open, distributed standard sounds good, but in practice, I think a few companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) would end up handling the gateway role for 95% of users, which puts you in an even more dangerous position.

3. The big players have little incentive to lower barriers to entry, and you have a chicken/egg problem in trying to force them to 'adapt or die'. Also, see #1.

4. If OpenID and OAuth aren't working (agree on the 1st, not sure on the 2nd), why not, and why would this be any different?

5. I don't see any way of implementing something like this over the next 50 years without either a) government mandate, or b) every internet giant getting involved. As I pointed out above, the internet giants are unlikely to do this, and the government getting more involved in the web is the last thing we need.

I think some of the problems you pointed out are legit, but I'm not sure that this kind of a system is really any better. It seems you'd be swapping one set of problems for another, and the new set of problems would seem to make the web extremely vulnerable to being controlled by a few large organizations, or the government. Over time, I see this kind of centralization and "perfect system" model resulting in stagnation and oppression.

Hello HN, I'm the guy who wrote the LYSE site! I Hope you'll enjoy it :) At least I have fun writing and drawing for it.

I'll always be fixing mistakes and technical points that were not caught in the reviewing process, so it's much appreciated if you give me comments and criticism. Feel free to speak your mind, I collect these ideas and build on them.

Getting the puns and thinking they're funny are two different things.

"Sigh...where to start?"

I wish you wouldn't have started off with that. It's insulting and doesn't add to the discussion. Just because you see the author's conclusions as somewhat naive (which you've articulated) doesn't make it OK to belittle his effort. FWIW, Other than that snide start it's a thoughtful post.

Yay, everyone's a hacker!

Except, they aren't. Writers may be clever people and smart, entertaining, and so on, but there are plenty of them that aren't really hackers by any definition that isn't so broad as to be completely meaningless.

Tripod hosting still exists?

Whoa, that was annoying.

the retweet thing is daft. the music annoying. the text flying in actually hurts your eyes. you didn't explain any new features. "a revamped comment system"? seriously?

Just give a screenshot with a few annotated labels. And next week isn't long enough for me to care.

I should add that I really really love Disqus, one of my favourite startups. Just a lame video. sorry. :/

Hiya. Mind if I make some suggestions on how you can write better in professional communications?

Lead with your strengths. Your first paragraph, which is the most important one you will write because it is the one that determines whether the rest of your piece gets read, is filled with self-inflicted strikes against you.

English is not my mother tongue and I’m not a great writer, so I am borrowing the words JFK used in

There is a place for modesty and self-effacement. It is not during proposals.

The quote from JFK does not give me a reason to entrust you with money. That suggests cutting it. Ruthlessly eliminate any distraction from the goal.

First of all: I to say I have applied for Winter 2010 YC funding with this idea (still have to make a video). The problem is I don’t think this is gonna get funded for two reasons: I have no team mates (YC tends to fund teams composed by 2-3 people) and I don’t have any solid idea on how to make it profitable.

Here you are again telling me how you're not the right man for the job.

So since my desire for a better Web to live and work in is kinda huge I am writing this article hoping that maybe it’s going to be an inspiration for someone else, or act as a catalyst. Or just to state the obvious. Whatever.

In addition to not being the right man for the job, you're diffident about even wanting to do the job. You are not projecting the image of a driven, with-it individual who is going to take a difficult technical, social, and marketing problem and solve it, making very rich rich men out of everyone associated with the project.

Look how differently your first paragraph reads from my reimagining of it:

The Internet as we know it is broken. Dozens of accounts per user -- broken! Web services that can't speak to each other -- broken! Our lives and friends scattered over a hundred web sites -- broken! Our identities owned by service providers -- broken!

We can fix the Internet. It will not be easy. Worthwhile things rarely are. The fix is a federated identity gateway, built out of technologies which are already accepted and in common use. The rest of this proposal will outline a sketch of what the federated identity gateway is, how it fixes the Internet, and why the first group who succeeds in building it will realize profits beyond the dreams of avarice.

Commentary: start with the problem, offer a solution, whet people's appetite for reading about the solution. Don't focus on yourself, most particularly not on your faults.

Interesting, but flawed to the point that the opposite conclusion is true. The median time zone for Europe is CET, which is GMT+1, not GMT as is put in the graphs, and the median American one is probably something like GMT-6.3 or so. If you move the graphs by 2.3 hours, they look pretty similar, except the European one has a steeper drop off. This can be explained by the fact that the majority of the U.S. population lives in either GMT-5 or GMT-8, but less in between. This tends to smear out the dropoff of people going to sleep in the U.S. On the other hand, the majority of European internet users are all in the CET time zone, so there is a sharper drop as they go to sleep.

I'd be interested to know if there has ever been a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees.

Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm FEMA claims they are under staffed.

There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.