Identity

Ralf Bendrath and friends are organizing an IdentityCamp in Bremen on June 7-8. According to Ralf’s blog post, the IdentityCamp will focus on the following topics:

• Identity 2.0
• Single Sign-On
• Reputation Management
• Privacy 2.0
• Relation Management
• and more

If I am not wrong, this will be the first Barcamp-like event on identity and related topics in Germany. It should be a very interesting event and certainly worth attending, especially if you’re living in Germany and one of the topics is dear to your heart. Knowing Ralf’s stance on OpenID, it will be also a very critical event.

I can’t say if I will be able to attend, though. Hopefully, I will.

Skipping through my feed subscriptions tonight I have stumbled across this Mashable article on managing online identities. Well, actually it’s one of the countless blog posts on Mashable all starting with 20+ Ways to…, 50+ Great…, 100+ Tools…. You’ll get the picture. Lists. Just lists. And rather often I have wondered if those lists were useful at all because usually services are described by just one or two sentences. Is anyone even getting a glimpse of what those services have to offer?

Anyway, this list on online identity is really confusing. There is an OpenID provider like myOpenID mentioned in the same context (=Online Identity Management) as a service like Garlik which is (among other features) providing information on house prices relating to people’s postal code and whatnot. And yes, it is a service for UK residents only which the Mashable list fails to mention.

Those services solve (or try to solve) very different tasks but are lumped together in just one category. How are readers supposed to make a decision on which service they should try. Yeah, they could try them all but would you have a look at all services if the first two or three were not what you were expecting?

The other day I was checking out Profilebuilder which has received some attention because it was sponsoring and launching at the recent TechCrunch party. The name of the service is actually explaining what it does or is trying to do: building an online profile.

When I first tested Profilebuilder it was hardly usable. Some typos and even more importantly, clicking on certain links and images didn’t work at all; also there were links to features which were not implemented at the time. At least that was my impression and eventually I gave in.

Today I have tried it again and some bugs are ironed out now. However it seems that I can have just seven active channels (photos, links, resume,…) and before adding a new one I have to deactivate another one which doesn’t seem to work. Also I haven’t really figured out what’s the difference between profilebuilder.com and profil.es. I am either dumb, clueless, blind or it just doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. At least it’s not the best application in terms of usability.

I give in, definitely. Let’s see if I can find the link to delete my account.

Wow, managing your reputation. At first this sounds unreal, really big words. Do I have a reputation, an online reputation? And do I even have to manage it? Reflecting on it a little bit more it becomes obvious that everyone who is active on the web has a reputation there. All the social networks we have joined, blogs we author, comments we have made, all the links people can find if they search for us on their favourite search engine. Those links define our online reputation and hopefully it is a positive one.

myOn-ID is a recently launched application (still in beta, though) which aims to help users managing their online reputation. So how does it work? After registering with it myOn-ID searches for your name and shows all matches. You can decide if those links are really about you or about a namesake; you can also decide if you want the links to become part of your profile on myON-D. Links can be tagged, described, rated, and re-arranged. Actually this can take some time. More than 70 links have been found about me, though I have decided that I don’t want them all to be part of my profile.

If you know profile aggregators this sounds probably familiar to you. ClaimID comes to mind as well as German OpenID provider Meinguter.name which is also looking for links automatically.

Though myON-ID is taking this approach one step further. You have to add contacts (other users of myON-ID) who rate you, thus getting some positive feedback on your own reputation. There is even a reputation index, though mine is still zero.

myOn-ID is a well designed application which does a decent job. It is not groundbreaking in any way but if you are into building an online reputation and you speak German (there is no international version available) this might be an application you want to test.

[via blognation Germany]