“Identity” is a hard-to-pin-down concept, especially when it comes to your ‘online identity’ in a world of Facebook profiles, Twitter and what seems to be becoming ‘multiple online identity disorder’.

Last year at SXSW I had the opportunity to chat to Chris Messina at an OpenID discussion who had some very insightful ideas about what the future holds for our definitions of our own identies online.

OpenID - making logging in a lot easier

OpenID is a handy system which allows you to have one log-in on multiple websites and is a way of counteracting the ‘oh now what was my password on this website’ problem. The slight difference being that you can choose which website you would like to use as the site that acts as the ‘provider’ of the service - including getting something like stef.lewandowski.name as a web address or even using your own blog address - in my case steflewandowski.com.

The offshoot of this idea is that having a site that lets you log in to multiple other sites easily moves onto a site that links all of those sites together into a kind of online web presence profile, should you want that.

Managing your online identity

Over the last year I’ve noticed a furry of activity in the ‘identity space’ (is ’space’ jargon?) with a fair few sites springing up that offer the service of ‘managing’ your identity in terms of how you appear to the world, connecting up any sites, links and articles you may have generated as well as letting you filter out ‘bogus’ sites and links which could mean that people googling you could form mistaken opinions about you.

Bad content about you = bad career prospects?

In the states there have been reports of prospective employees not getting ‘that job’ because of what appears on the web about them (you know - that dumb video of you doing a dance at a party, etc.) - so these sites have appeared to fill the perceived gap in the market for people to take control of how they appear online.

Here’s my personal opinion on which of the main identity management sites suit my needs

I’ve sat on the fence for about a year on this one, waiting for the dust to settle and today (because I’m doing some research into a new idea), I basically took the main competing sites for a test-drive.

My criteria

1. I want to use OpenID, for free, with my own website domain name
2. I want to be able to have a site that lists all of the places that I have an active profile online.
3. I want to make it easier for people to find what they want to about me, for whatever reason
4. I want some privacy options so I can retain control
5. I want a widget that I can put on my blog with icons for each of my sites
6. I want it to be very easy to add new sites to my profile
7. I don’t want to join another social network - I’m happy with the sites I am on

Step 1. Join ClaimID

ClaimID is a simple little site that basically offers an OpenID provider service (so I can do the OpenID thing for free - nice).

Also, once you have set it up, you can then set up your blog or any other website as the web address you type in when you want to log in somewhere using OpenID.

You do that by adding these lines to your HEAD area in the template of your site:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.claimid.com/server" />

<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.claimid.com/aeioux" />

#1 done.

ClaimID also offers a ‘list all your websites in one place’ service which is quite nice, and you can categorise them too:

That’s really nice, and was quite easy to set up. I think there’s also a bookmarklet you can get that lets you add sites and things to your profile. Cool.

But things fall down on the Wordpress/icons front. There’s a Widget that they provide that you can download and install on your blog. Really easy to set-up, etc. but the end result is disappointing.

So I add it to my sidebar and what do I get. A Javascript that calls the ClaimID API and returns an apparently randomly-ordered list of sites with no categories and no icons… not that useful:

The link to Fierce! Festival, for instance is one that I’ve put in an ‘Associated’ category, while the 3form site is a ‘by me / about me’ link. That doesn’t come across.

Okay. So for me that was ‘FAIL’ .

Also - I fired up Facebook and tried adding the ClaimID Application and this is what I got:

Hmm - not really filling me with confidence there…

Where next? Naymz

So I googled around a while and came across Naymz - a site that does the ‘identity managment’ thing but doesn’t do the OpenID angle. It’s USP is that they actually pay for google ads on your behalf based on your name to attract traffic to their site.

I’ve had invites in the past but ignored them. Today I set up a profile to see what I got.

To be honest - it was a pretty disappointing experience. The whole thing seems to be based around some kind of bizarre points system that seems to be aimed at very strange people who think that connecting with other people in the world is based on accumulating “RepScore” in your “Reputation Network”. On every page of the site from sign-up to adding links and so on I was constantly reminded about how I had “No RepScore”:

Awful.

At least go with “undefined” if you really want to push it, but to be honest that’s just put me off, even though I was willing to set aside the horrible name. Don’t I already have a (boring and not really doing very much other than being an online CV) LinkedIn profile for this kind of thing?

Ah well. Where else?

At this point I hit Google again and found a great article by Somewhat Frank on this subject from about a year ago. Firing up all of the links a couple of sites jumped out:

Ziki

These guys promise:

Create your free personal or business profile.

Be listed on the top on Google search results when

someone searches for your personal or business name.

With Ziki, people who search for you will find you.

Okay, sounds good, but the site itself was a little bit clunky and I wasn’t really ‘feeling it’ - to be honest I’d rather people found my blog really. It was taking me ages to add links, with loads of backwards and forwards, manual typing in of RSS feeds and so on. I got bored. Next?

Profilactic

Why is it that the most random names seem to be associated with the best stuff on the web - del.icio.us for instance? Anyway - holding my nose at the dodgy ‘dad joke’ pun, what I immediately found was an attractive ‘open feeling’ site that was ridiculously easy to get up and running and set up my list of sites that I am part of.

They even had a drop down menu where you could choose, say Flickr or Tumblr and so on, just drop in your username or url id and it would be added to a long list of sites and feeds.

Profilactic focusses on the idea of a ‘mashup’ of your online persona which certainly fits with how I see it.

It doesn’t promise some kind of ’search engine optimised’ listing for you, but instead extends on the idea of a ‘life feed’, adding the identity management thing in as a component. I feel much more comfortable with this - like I’m in control.

My new sidebar widget

So, grabbing some javascript code from their ‘badge’ maker I paste it into my sidebar and I get …

Cool. I get my icons, they are ordered alphabetically, and if I want to add something in future it will just appear. Still - no categories, but… and here’s the nice bit. ClaimID is one of my links on there. So I can add stuff to that, because I like the way it works. Shame about the formatting but I’m sure I can do something about that.

So to recap on my wish-list

1. I want to use OpenID, for free, with my own website domain name - ClaimID
2. I want to be able to have a site that lists all of the places that I have an active profile online - ClaimID for pages linking in to me that are relevant. Profilactic for what I want to show on my blog etc.
3. I want to make it easier for people to find what they want to about me, for whatever reason. Basically the best way is to choose one profile and go with it and maybe have profiles on all these sites anyway just to be sure. My blog is my main port of call so my sidebar is best, followed by googling and getting one of the two sites I chose.
4. I want some privacy options so I can retain control. I didn’t find any privacy options on Profilactic but I did on ClaimID - to be investigated.
5. I want a widget that I can put on my blog with icons for each of my sites. Yay - got it with Profilactic.
6. I want it to be very easy to add new sites to my profile. ClaimID has a bookmarklet for sites/pages/blogs linking to you, Profilactic is insanely easy to add whole sites to.
7. I don’t want to join another social network - I’m happy with the sites I am on. Yep - that’s probably where Ziki and Naymz didn’t work for me. I already have a fair few sites I am on and to be honest Facebook seems to do most of the ‘connecting with people’ thing for me.

Thanks - I hope some of this is useful for you?

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