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Badges, shields, icons and chicklets are becoming more pervasive on blogs and discussion forums as companies offer tracking, verification and identity management services. I recently came across some new entrants, ClaimID and MicroID.
ClaimID will allow users to track, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about them online.That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn’t about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It’s time to reclaim some power back from the search engines.
ClaimID went into public beta in February. Fred Stutzman says they are staying away from verified identity services like OpenID and that they are not what they call wisdom-of-crowds or social recommender service like Opinity or iKarma. If you have ever felt the sickening feeling of ego-searching for yourself in a search engine and seeing someone else with a similar name, blog url etc in search results, you’ll understand the need for ClaimID.
The ClaimID company blog mentioned MicroID. Jeremie Miller of Jabber is behind MicroID (blog).
MicroID is a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. A small decentralized verifiable identity.
We’re not done yet, TrustBacks are like trackbacks, “a set of credentials that’s generated from all interactions with people and not just by authorship.” This is typical, I read the description, and then the example, and I’m scratching my head about how it all fits together. You really have to dig into the blogs for these offerings to get the whole gist of what they are trying to do.
Trufina, Opinity and iKarma are VC-funded startups that have been working on these issues for a long time, from different angles. The organic nature of a handful of different groups working loosely together may work in the blogosphere, but sustainable working identity management systems have had difficult times getting traction in the past. Lot’s of conference chatter and very little workable implementations that don’t require geek credentials to experience have been the norm until recently.
Perhaps a few scrappy programmers building on blog platforms and plugging into identity meta-systems like SXIP and InfoCard with other value-added modules is what it will take to get the whole sector out of R&D mode.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
We’ve been saying for a while that its time for people in industry to start giving people tools for managing their online selves - your piece pulls these tools together nicely - I think the future is quite bright once we start loosely joining them. Again, thanks for the nice coverage, we really appreciate it.
One final note…one of the reasons we don’t already have a “perfect” universal ID system across the world is that millions of religious people see this as an initial step toward marking everyone with a sign of the beast. Just try and tell this population that they all need to sign up for a unique ID that will allow them to buy and sell and send email on the internet and you’ll understand instantly why finding a perfect solution to the ID problem is something we would rather leave to Bill Gates. Lots of Mac users already think he’s the devil, so perhaps he won’t mind if they are joined by a few billion more. LOL