Can claimID provide credibility?
April 21st, 2006 - Terrell RussellMike Bijon, Moogle1, has just discovered claimID. He thinks we’ve got potential but is concerned about our users’ ability to prove stuff they claim - or rather, readers being able to prove to themselves that our users are telling the truth with what they claim.
We’re dealing with that, by simply trusting that people will continue doing their research. ClaimID should be a stop along a searcher’s journey. We’re not doing authentication of any outside data or the claims that are made at claimID. A great many of the classifications that happen at claimID (by/about) are personal and not much more than opinions.
If you already have an account, look back over your own decisions of how you classified your links. I bet some of them will strike you as strange - “I said that was about me? Hmm.”
I think Mike is wise to question how all this will work, but honestly, it should work simply because the network is so complex. Trying to control something like that is bound to fail. We’re trying to play nice.
All that said, Mike’s idea for Trustbacks is solid. It plays well with the spirit of openness and implicit complexity in our networks today - our networks both social and technical.
I’m calling the extension of the trackback system a “TrustBack” and think it can be used to show credibility on and off the web - basically a set of credentials that’s generated from all interactions with people and not just by authorship. Trustbacks should work the same way that trackbacks currently do, but they will require some additional storage, provider, or invitation system to bring non-bloggers into the mix. Also, I should be able to maintain a skill profile for my trustbacks to better show the credibility of my skills and to avoid the “list of my friends” that seems to be the core of most current social networks (Myspace, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc.).
Join Mike and claimID in this discussion. How will be be presenting ourselves online? Do we try to collect and collate and present? Or do we list skills and those who might vouch for us? All of the above?
April 21st, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Cote’s got it right. There’s lots of people playing the verified game, and claimID should (and will) nicely. Now we just gotta find the time to integrate OpenID (yeah, Cote, it’s coming) - but the semester ends soon!
April 24th, 2006 at 7:53 am
I think I came down harder on claimID than I meant to. The concept and timing is great and should offer an improvement over the current methods of validating ID’s. As far as I can tell the market is currently monopolized by the closed-system of each of the credit reporting agencies. And they certainly aren’t interested in trust or relationships (or even security, it seems) at all. It’s best we take it out of the hands of those agencies and don’t depend on eBay or MySpace to open their systems either. ClaimID is a good start toward opening things up and giving contrl back to the users, even without a working system up. I just hope Terrell and his team at claimID make the system play nice with others - thus, my continued shouting about needing a protocol or open standard so that the “complex network” described by Terrell will stay up regardless of funding, bandwidth, or any commercial players.
Fred, you’re completely right about Cote’s description of the process at http://www.redmonk.com/cote/archives/2006/04/identity_20_tru.html. He’s got it right and the parties he mentions at OpenID, LID, and microID are already well into implementation. Indeed, all of those systems (after a quick glance) should work well - so long as the primary users are geeky enough to own their own URL’s/hosting accounts. However, once a service is offered to freely host ID URL’s those URL’s won’t confirm anything more than having a Hotmail address does now. That, of course, is why closed trust systems like eBay’s are shallow but still worth something. So, we either need to restrict digital identities to a subset of people willing and able to pay for the URL/priviledge or to build in some sort of feedback loop that adds a level of trust to each identifying domain - thus motivating those hosting ID URL’s for free to keep spam registrations low or face migration away from their systems.
April 24th, 2006 at 8:25 am
[...] Terrell Russell commented on my earlier ID/trust post at in “Can claimID provide credibility?” and a commenter there, Fred Stutzman, pointed out some great info about how trust can be built on a foundation of untrusted URL’s, as well as pointing out several ID protocols in the making: OpenID, LID, and microID. [...]
April 26th, 2006 at 5:03 am
It’s good to hear I got it “right”
I’m really interested to see how the user-centric identity thinking pans out over the next year or so. It looks like it’ll be exciting, and then maybe I can finally stop entering the same profile data at every new site that comes along. My selfish desire, of course, is seeing this as a major Roach Motel Buster, which is always a good thing to see in effect.
April 29th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Sweet..Now I understand what a Roach Motel Buster is! Lets just say - you had it right for us. We always knew our play wouldn’t be doing verified identity - and identity 2.0 (or user-centric identity, or the identity metasystem) steps in perfectly to offer us the bits and parts we need. We can plug in the parts they’d do better than us anyway, and we’re staying open and standards-based. It just makes sense in our case (and in lots of other cases like ours).