Manage your online identity.

We are flipping the switch tonight on a little upgrade.

We are planning a two hour window for this migration/maintenance.

Watch for ninjas. We hope they will work quickly and without any fat ninja fingers.

Update: Fat fingers (and mysql bin logs) thwarted our attack this evening – we’ll be back tomorrow to try again…

Update: All done.  If you can see this – we’re on the new server and all is well.

Over the past few days, a good number of posts about OpenID crossed my feed reader.  These posts had made it to the front page of Digg, Del.icio.us – meaning lots of good eyeballs for OpenID.  Here are some examples:

• Simon Willison – How to turn your blog into an OpenID.  A great post about how to make your blog an openID.  Of course you can use your claimID URL as your OpenID in this fantastic howto.
• Six Apart Weblog – OpenID’s Growing Momentum.  The folks at Six Apart have been using OpenID for a long time – these forward thinkers speculate on some of OpenID’s momentum going forward.
• O’Reilly Radar – OpenID on the Upswing.  O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest checks in on OpenID and shows Google Trends data.

These are great links, with lots of resources.  Here are some other cool links we’ve come across:

• ClaimID Weblog – OpenID Resources.  Ahem Just a good collection of links to everything OpenID.
• Adam Fortuna – MicroID, the coolest technology from 2006 you’ve never heard of.  Not OpenID, but MicroID is very dear to our heart – Adam contributes code and explains MicroID.

OpenID is an organic phenomenon, but all of this great coverage wouldn’t happen without the hard work of professional instigators like Scott Kveton and Chris Messina.  And the phenomenon wouldn’t be anywhere near it is today without the hard work of coders like Brian Ellin who have contributed so much open source OpenID code.

2007 looks like an exciting year for OpenID and ClaimID.  This identity stuff is really starting to catch on.  We knew that it would take a little time, that we’d have to be slow and a little methodological, but the reality is people need identity solutions.  In the next year, we’re going to work hard to deliver those solutions to you, all the while keeping ClaimID a simple, trustworthy and useful place.

I returned from the IIW in Mountain View with newfound excitement for this identity layer we’re all building together.

Six months ago, there was a sense of the coming tide of interoperability with the convergence around CardSpace and OpenID and what the Higgins project was doing/planning. Today, the coming tide is lapping on the beach. There were a great many demos up and running, on multiple platforms, doing things with ease. In fact, most of the demos were quite boring (the standard “single sign-on demo problem”) since there was nothing to “see” as a user. You click, and you’re in!

I suspect the next IIW will be *much* more corporate. There were about 3 sessions run by people who were not “standards guys” trying to get a conversation going about making money with this stuff. This was 3 more than six months ago. It’s changing quickly…

All that said, I think the next big thing is providing a reputation layer on top of the identity layer. Still a year(?) or two out, claimID seems positioned to be a strong early player in that space. Time will tell.

I posted a little more about my week in California over here:

I’m here at the Internet Identity Workshop and have been having a number of great conversations. The quality of the discussions is high and the number of demos is remarkable. Only seven months ago when I was in Mountain View for the earlier IIW2006, there were a couple demos of near-working implementations and a lot of excitement about what the next few months were going to unleash as these systems started to come online. It’s also when the idea was first hatched to bake OpenID into claimID. So long ago.

A great many things have happened since then. Higgins is now demoing live open source implementations of a variety of tools, including Bandit, around the newly announced OpenID 2.0 spec. We have full OpenID 1.1 libraries in all the major programming languages. OpenID 2.0 code should be rolling out within a couple weeks from a number of the vendors here. Dick Hardt of Sxip demoed the newly announced Sxipper Firefox plugin. There was a Safari InfoCard Selector demo complete with modal overlays. There were a surprising number of demos (Java, even) fully functioning with versions of Microsoft’s CardSpace (coming baked into every copy of Vista in a few short months). Avery Glasser of VxV Solutions demoed his company’s voiceprint technology fully integrated and interoperable with OpenID. JanRain demoed their new BotBouncer site designed to serve as a centralized CAPTCHA repository so users can know a particular OpenID has passed a humanness test.

This weekend, we helped run a Social Software Symposium here in Chapel Hill.  Over 35 researchers, academics and experts gathered for two days to discuss social software – how to design it, how to study it, and how to utilize it.  The conversation was heavily tied to identity – it is unbelievable how much interest there is in identity these days.

If you’re interested in reading some of the symposium materials, here is a link to the wiki.  The wiki has notes on the sessions, research questions, and a lot of other useful stuff we brainstormed over the course of the weekend.  Very fun stuff.