0xDECAFBAD - Tag: identity

meetro asks myspace who i am

2006-08-23T15:43:20+00:00

Now, this is what I'm talking about. It's just too bad they're only importing from Myspace. And that it didn't apparently work when I tried it.

Archived Comments

vinnie
2006-08-29T19:51:45

hey, i'm one of the folks behind meetro, sorry to hear it wasn't working when you tried. If you want to give it another try, everything is in order. We're working on adding support for other sites.

about me as a plugin

2006-08-19T19:18:42+00:00

We need both ends of this. We need the social networks to be able to import the data. But we also need the personal blog software to support an "About Me" page that maintains and publishes the master copy.

Source: Voidstar - Personal About Me Pages and account creation

This sounds like a perfect job for a decent WordPress plugin, which could double as a standalone PHP app.

Archived Comments

Niklas Gustavsson
2006-08-21T19:25:37

Sounds a lot like what the OpenID protocol with the Simple Registration extension aims at. Using, for example, the PHP implementation of the OpenID server, you could maintain your identity (as long as it supports Simple Registration). Then, at the site where you'r required to register, you simply fill in your OpenID identifier and the rest is magic.

There is also a Wordpress plugin (http://singpolyma-tech.blogspot.com/2006/04/openid-for-wordpress.html) available that will run a server within Wordpress, if that's what you would like.

Personally I use the myopenid.com server, but running your own should be just fine. That's the point of a distributed identity system :-) You can read a little bit more about my experience setting it up in Wordpress here: http://www.protocol7.com/archives/2006/08/21/openid-on-protocol7/

/niklas
l.m.orchard
2006-08-21T20:12:53

Having an OpenID endpoint here is one part of what I'd like to do. The other is a kind of NetVibes-ish public aggregation of all my output from other sites, and to point new services here as I join them to import my already-provided details. So, beyond the auth that OpenID provides, I want other sites to read my hCard and profile data etc.
Niklas Gustavsson
2006-08-21T22:00:10

Not sure if it will allow for all the information you would like to provide, but simple registration does allow for a site where you authenticate with OpenID to retrive the needed data. The subset of information (http://openid.net/specs/openid-simple-registration-extension-10.html#responseformat) might be limiting though. Of course, that won't include more rich data collected at other sites, like your del.icio.us links.

what use claimid?

2006-08-19T18:02:21+00:00

So, now that I've had a brief bit of serial enthusiasm in discovering this whole microID / claimID thing, all it's ended up with in practical terms is a list of links in my sidebar. So, with that and fully understanding that it's early days yet for claimID, I have to ask myself: What does this do that I couldn't have done with a tagged set of del.icio.us bookmarks? Of course, bookmarks on del.icio.us don't enjoy any sort of microID verification, but that could change - either through features implemented there directly or through a sidecar service. My original gripe was about both machines and people finding out about me from a central source. So far claimID seems to be good for just people finding out about me.

By the way, this is not criticism or a put-down of claimID - this is me thinking out loud and puzzling it out.

Update: Although, I certainly understand the utility of microID in replacing blog posts like this one.

Archived Comments

Fred
2006-08-20T18:01:06

These are really quite valid questions, and stuff as important as identity does deserve our puzzling. ClaimID is a model - just as blogs enabled millions of people to share their voice online, claimID lets people have a way to approach their identity. Simple? Yes - but that's the point. There are tons of people out there who have stuff about them online (mailing list archives, blog comments) who don't have the time, desire or expertiese to create a myname.com site, or even a html list of links about themselves. ClaimID is designed so that these people can have a dead simple solution for a fundamental need.

Of course, on top of that you do get value adds...the personal SEO stuff is nice, having your links tied together for search engines are nice, the microformats stuff, link status checking, having an OpenID, and so on - but the main experience is the simplicity. For as important as identity is, most people really still aren't going out of their way to protect/defend their names. Maybe this will change in the future, maybe it won't - but we are betting that the way to get people in the door, to start them thinking about the process is through simplicity.

Honestly, though, we're still figuring all of this out. Identity is huge, complicated, loaded with meaning and interpretation - and we aren't going to say that we've got all the answers. But reading posts, responding, listening - we really feel like we're learning a lot. Our goal down the road is for ClaimID to be a place where you can simply an easily have your identity needs met. That said, we're still working on it, and thanks for being part of the process!

Best, Fred

Don't ask me who I am

2006-08-17T17:24:25+00:00

I'm tired of filling out profiles, and I'm tired of building up networks of others' profiles online. Everyone needs to adopt something like ~~FOAF~~ hCard and XFN (updated per suggestion from Kevin Marks), and be done with it. The networks should be semi-automated, or at least suggested, by detecting who I know from other places as they hop on another bandwagon with me. (The separations between implicit groups bounded by the particular service are as important as explicitly defined groups.)

LiveJournal was my first experience with much self-disclosure online, into which I dove with much enthusiasm. But since then, I just haven't felt the need to replicate self-disclosure anywhere else but on my own site. Orkut, Rize, LinkedIn, MySpace, Vox, del.icio.us, last.fm, flickr, 43 {Things|People|Places} -- these are sites in which I've had some passing or lasting interest in the last few years, but I wish I could just point them all at a single source for learning about me. It all needs to be turned inside out, and lock-ins removed.

Centrallized identity and social network management for distributed service providers is what I want. I'm sure there's already a movement afoot, and I've just not reached that spot in my to-read list.

Archived Comments

Mad William Flint
2006-08-17T18:42:12

bah. they should take vCard data and be done with it. So much already does.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-17T19:47:00

Well, one thing I like about FOAF, is that it's extensible. So, as more categories of self-disclosure become popular, they can be dumped into that one central thingy
Geof F. Morris
2006-08-17T20:23:01

Actually, Les, I haven't seen it either. I'm with you: I sure as hell would love to only write this crap once. Even copy-and-paste is just too much shit to do!
Bob Zoller
2006-08-18T00:38:27

This is basically Marc Canter's current mission in life, from the sounds of it. See his PeopleAggregator (http://peopleaggregator.com/) project.
Mad William Flint
2006-08-18T01:43:17

Foaf's cute. but I don't think it's any more extensible than vCard is (iirc)

However, it is nice for actual F-O-A-F semantics. But you'll never see someone's foaf at the bottom of their email, auto-imported into exchange, etc.

Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but there's all ready too damn much xml in the world by my reckonin'
Martin Spernau
2006-08-18T07:49:15

Yes, the Peopleaggregator sets out to solve this :) This http://traumwind.de/tindertraum/archives/debabelizeing_profiles.html is the beginnig of the "IdentityHub" -Martin
Terrell Russell
2006-08-18T13:45:20

claimID, claimID!

http://claimID.com

Give it a whirl and see if you like what we're doing. Point to it. Point from it. Keep it in one place.

Terrell http://claimID.com/terrell
Mad William Flint
2006-08-18T14:51:47

Nice. I'll concede the point to hCard.
Jim Renaud
2006-08-18T16:48:39

Can't we just use the information the NSA is compiling for us? This way we don't even have to enter it ourselves!
Ian Bicking
2006-08-18T16:51:10

http://videntity.org/ seems to be offering a bunch of these things together; more as an example, since anyone offering the same information would be a peer.
Bob Aman
2006-08-18T23:34:44

I'm a minor fan of claimID, but I much prefer hardcore decentralization. FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn't rely on RDF. XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they're still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF. Sadly, there's no good format that solves a sufficiently large number of the problems in this space (that doesn't carry the RDF baggage anyways).
Danny
2006-08-19T09:01:02

Right on Les! There are two issues, identification/authentication (hard, but the outlook looks promising) and personal profile/description (easier, already pretty much solved by the tech you mention). Hopefully the two should be joined up before long...

re. Bob's comment: "XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they’re still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF.". Indeed, they also help considerably with the problem of expressing this kind of machine-readable data in HTML. But "FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn’t rely on RDF." - the power, the expressivity of FOAF comes from RDF.

I suspect Bob (like Mad William) may be assuming RDF (including FOAF) has to mean RDF/XML. But RDF is a model, it doesn't have to serialize to XML, there are other formats - including HTML (via eRDF). Note too that microformats like XFN and hCard can be interpreted as RDF (including FOAF terms as appropriate) with GRDDL.

(Incidentally I got to this post before even looking in my personal agg via Marc Canter's on Planet Web 2.0)
Steve
2006-08-19T17:37:36

But you're forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn't want all my profiles to be identical. I don't use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.
Bob Aman
2006-08-19T22:24:28

Danny, I am actually aware of all of those acronyms, however, I completely disagree on the point about FOAF's expressivity relying mainly on RDF. I would contend that FOAF's expressivity actually relies far, far more, simply on XML's ability to namespace things, and thus allow for extensions. Something that a simple XML dialect would also have, but with the added bonus of an infinitely simpler parser, fewer confused programmers, and quite a bit less bandwidth consumed.
Tantek Çelik
2006-08-20T07:22:55

Indeed Les, this is exactly what hCard solves on the Web with the minimum of duplication of data into hidden places and mimetype hackery/configuration (problems of the other approaches mentioned).

You can either use a 3rd party service like claimID as mentioned to claim your various profiles on the Web, or you can simply continue to publish your profile information on your about or author page, simply add just a bit of hCard markup, and use XFN Identity Consolidation (rel="me") to turn your about page into your consolidated identity hub.

While services will undoubtedly continue to ask you a hundred profile questions, the better ones will do something as simple as use the simple open source hKit Microformats Toolkit by Drew McLellan to let you simply enter your hCard URL and fill out all the questions automatically from that.

And the best services will help you, the user, keep your profile as portable as you would like it, by marking it up with hCard as well. Already, profiles on numerous services, in addition to the abovementioned claimID, like Flickr and Technorati are marked up with hCard and thus ready for reuse with services that use hKit.

Finally, some have brought up "extensibility" as something that is desirable yet recent lessons have taught us that in terms of standards and interoperability, the opposite is true. The more well-defined not-infinitely-extensible a standard is, the sooner implementers know they are "done" implementing it (interoperably even!), and the less chance there is of a zillion non-interoperable extensions randomly emerging (i.e. Tower of Babel problem) which then cause headaches not only for all implementers, but users as well as the users then have to contend with their data not quite working interoperably across all the different services that all support slightly different sets of incompatible/non-interoperable extensions.
Mike Macgirvin
2006-08-22T20:38:14

I agree with Steve. Who am I? It depends. Who are you, and based on that - what do I wish you to know about me? Who are my friends? Same thing. Even if I wanted to divulge them, I then need to respect their privacy wishes and decide if they want you to know that they are a friend of mine (or not) and how they came to be tagged as friends. A web service which tries to consolidate all of this info is presented with too many privacy conflicts to ever get it right (IMAO). I can recall this concept being tried by a hundred different companies (not to mention open source projects) going back to the early 90's. It was never an issue of technology. The hurdles are primarily social and revolve around trust and privacy - and delegation of these rights to third parties in language even my mother would understand.
Wohnaccessoires
2007-03-16T22:04:59

But you’re forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn’t want all my profiles to be identical. I don’t use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.

0xDECAFBAD - Tag: identity

meetro asks myspace who i am

Archived Comments

about me as a plugin

Archived Comments

what use claimid?

Archived Comments

see also

Don't ask me who I am

Archived Comments