Google Pumps OpenID Too

Following news that Yahoo! is joining the OpenID fray, it appears Google is dipping a toe in too. While those two giants work out their implementations, others are raising the temperature of the debate on IDM solutions. Stefan Brands is among the OpenID naysayers (David Recordon’s response), while Scott Gillbertson sees a bright future. [...]

Yahoo! Pumps OpenID

Ars notes that Yahoo! supports OpenID. Yeah, that OpenID.

Gravatar Acquired, More Features & Better Reliability Ahead

Matt pointed out that Automattic has purchased Gravatar, the globally recognizable avatar service. Om speaks of the economics and Matt’s cagy, but it’s hard not to see the possibility of creating a larger identity solution around this. WordPress’ market penetration is huge, a service that connects those nearly two million blogs could offer real value, [...]

The “Show of Force” Brand

A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “the ‘force’ brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands.”
Army, iraq, show of force, brand, identity, [...]

Reputation Management At Applied Dreams 2.2

Ryan gave me the drop on this presentation by Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst where they do an amusingly effective job of explaining the concept of reputation management. It all went down at the conclusion of the Applied Dreams 2.2 project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano.
The project brief begins:
Our identities are changing due [...]

IdM Takes Lessons From the Microformats Crowd

A tip from Ryan sent me looking at MicroID:

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.

The idea is to hash a user’s email address (or other identifier) with the name of the site it will be published on, giving a string that can be inserted — in true Microformats style — as an element of the html on the site.

Facial Recognitition Spytech Goes Social

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora.

Dick Hardt ’s Identity 2.0 Presentation

I said “identity management is the next big thing” back in September. That was before I’d seen Sxip founder Dick Hardt’s presentation on Identity 2.0. Zach peeped me the link and told me I wouldn’t regret watching the presentation. He was right. Everybody, especially the people who don’t yet care about identity management, should take [...]

Next Big Thing: Identity Management

I might be overstating it, but Identity Management is the next big thing for the open source community to tackle. That’s why I like Sxip, even though I know so little about it.
There are a number of other solutions stewing, but most of those that I’m aware of are targeted at academic and enterprise users. [...]