Manage your online identity.

Michael Habib has just published an excellent article about ClaimID and OpenID in Library Journal’s netConnect – you can read it online here. Michael summarizes the article on his blog:

Managing Your Identity Online – 10/15/2007 – netConnect – The article is about online identity and claimID with a sidebar on OpenID. The article breaks down into the following sections (brief excerpts are provided).

• Introduction to claimID and online identity
  

  A new breed of web services have started providing ordinary web users with the tools they need to take back control of their online identity.

• Permanent information online
  

  However, with the rising popularity of blogging and the explosion of social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace, googling potential employees quickly became commonplace. Stutzman and Russell recognized that, while particular services such as MySpace may come and go (see “My Space or Your Space,” LJ netConnect, Fall 2006. p. 8–12), social web services are here to stay. More important, a whole generation is destined to scatter personal and professional information around the web for the rest of their lives.

• Who are you?
  

  If your name is John Smith and someone googles you, it’s not unlikely that the googler can mistakenly think certain information discovered (divorce, etc.) is yours. Wouldn’t it be helpful if there were a method to explain which John Smith you are?

• Taking control
  

  In the claimID FAQ, Stutzman and Russell explain that they embraced “simplicity and standards” when designing the concept. The common thread connecting all the online identity signifiers together is that they all have a web address. Consequently, they decided the simplest way to manage an online identity was by enabling users to create a list of web addresses related to their identity.

• Standards for identity
  

  Once Stutzman and Russell had enabled users to create and sort an annotated list of web sites related to their identity, they turned to emerging identity standards to add additional value to the list. They first implemented MicroID, an open standard that provides a way to verify that the person who owns a claimID profile also “owns” the content to which they are linking.

As students in an Information and Library Science program, its always awesome when we are recognized inside the profession. Thanks to Michael for putting together a great article. Read the full version here.

OAuth

A few days ago, the minds behind OAuth launched the site and declared their spec at 1.0-final. This is big news as many sites are duplicating engineering efforts in creating their own APIs. OAuth is a standardized, open way of managing an API handshake for your web application. OAuth can be implemented by the application provider or by the consumer/widget.

From the front page:

An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.

It’s a valet key for web applications:

Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.

At claimID, we’re very excited to see this development, as we’ve been planning for an authenticated API for sometime. We hope to work through our own implementation soon. Congratulations to everyone associated with the OAuth progress. This is another step to making the web more open and interoperable.

As always, our friend Chris Messina is all over it:

Cheers and congrats to all the folks who helped to make this happen. It might be a relatively minor step in terms the development of new technology today, but looking out long enough into the horizon, I think we’re adding a significantly important piece of puzzle that’s been missing for some time.

Definitely an important piece, and until this past week, a missing piece.

OpenID.net

Additionally, OpenID.net got a facelift earlier this week. The new site is much cleaner and does a much better job of explaining what OpenID is, as well as what you can do with one. Congratulations to David Recordon and Scott Kveton for their hard work pulling things together. The OpenID Foundation now has a nicer place to call home as well.

Of course, we’re also tickled to be alphabetically blessed – we’re listed first on the “How do I get an OpenID” page: