inames: Your Portable Identity
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!
