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!
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:59 am
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.
July 3rd, 2006 at 11:08 am
inames is an application built on OpenID, Boris.
July 4th, 2006 at 4:48 am
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.
July 4th, 2006 at 4:51 am
inames and Identity…
Alec Saunders, writes in his blog about a universal identification system that is being worked on named inames. He writes: What’s an iname? It’s a human friendly handle (mine is =alec.saunders) for a person or organization that you can use……
July 4th, 2006 at 7:23 am
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…
July 4th, 2006 at 9:59 am
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.