Videntity: Online Business Card

May 3, 2007 in Identity, Microformats, OpenID by Carsten Pötter | 3 comments

I have read about Videntity a couple of months ago but never really got around to check it out. Eventually I have managed to have a closer look at it yesterday.

Videntity serves two purposes: It is an OpenID provider as well as a modern form of a business card. If you already have an OpenID you can sign in with that one; you don’t need to register.

First you start building a very detailed profile about yourself. You are able to add private data like your home address, phone numbers, a link to an image of yourself,… Similar data can be added for your business details: employer, phone number,… for each entry you can decide if it’s public or if it should remain private.

Though if you are really lazy you can also link to your profile pages on Last.fm or Flickr and import data from there. Videntity makes heavy use of microformats. Profiles are marked up as hCards and it is able to import data from other hCards and also FOAF. Sites like Flickr and Last.fm provide such data.

Your profile page will look like this:

videntity

Videntity also features some basic contact management. Just add a link to your contacts’ OpenID or their user profiles on other networks. Additionally you can mark them up with XFN values.

Certainly Videntity is not perfect yet but it is another very intriguing approach to online contact and profile management. Profile data can be downloaded as a vCard or as FOAF and you can also embed a card with your business details on every website.

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  1. Stephen Paul Weber’s avatar

    Stephen Paul Weber on May 9, 2007 at 18:05

    I have been doing some work recently to integrate Videntity more into the online experience, including a plugin for WordPress (http://singpolyma.net/plugins/videntity/) and a bookmarklet (http://singpolyma.net/2007/04/videntity-bookmarklet/)

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on May 9, 2007 at 18:10

    Thanks for the info. I will have a look at them. :)

  3. Robert Mark White’s avatar

    Robert Mark White on July 26, 2007 at 07:48

    I have been using Videntity for a while now and it is great I love the Microformats but it needs to add MicroID so I can claim my Videntity on ClaimId or Wink.