It looks as if the dream of a user controlled, portable identity is about to become a reality. I’ve been swapping email with Kaliya Hamlin about identity standards. She has pointed me to inames.net, a commons for identity. Christine Herron has also recently written about this effort.
What’s an iname? It’s a human friendly handle (mine is =alec.saunders) for a person or organization that you can use to organize all of your identity bits in one place – email addresses, phone numbers, IM handles and so on. Like DNS, you simply pick a registrar, and select a name. Services include single sign-on, contact, forwarding, and a unified address book.
Cool!
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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How many =joe.smiths are there?
I like URL-based identity schemes like OpenID or SXIP better. I don't think putting an equal sign in front of something necessarily makes it easy. It works today with Wordpress and many other systems — try http://www.myopenid.com, http://www.claimid.com, or install a plugin.
inames is an application built on OpenID, Boris.
Pretty interesting. I am wondering how it will differentiate between similar names. But, its definitely a step in the right direction. Certainly seems like it.
the 2idi.com site registering i-names is doing so at $20 a shot, I could get a domain name for a couple of years for that!
myopenid is free, but I'm not really convinced it will be successful unless it gets accepted by something like Jabber, MySpace, or Skype or another big IM tool. Unlikely…
Paul is right – the killer app is IM. Buddy lists are the next big thing. How you hook it all up is the problem that has to be solved and I don't yet see how inames will do it.
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