This is great news. I met most of the OpenID leaders at the Identity Conference at Harvard. While there are a number of usability and safety issues to address, the adoption rate for OpenID is taking off, slowly but surely. What is it up to now, 100+ million people? Problem is, most people don’t know what OpenID is, even if they have one.

More at TechCrunch.

I’ve been a proponent of user-centric profiles for a long time. Portable profiles stored in transparent database clouds which bi-directionally receive and propogate changes to user-managed profiles are going to be a major feature of the next version of the web.

ProfileBuilder is the latest startup to get into the centralized profile game, launching a few months ago. Today there is news from Mashable and Tech Crunch that ProfileBuilder has launched Profil.es, the search engine/front end for profiles stored at ProfileBuilder.

One of the more interesting part of Profilebuilder are Channels:

Channels contain content in your profile. For example, we are channels that will show information about you, list your eBay items for sale, display your twitter posts, link to your favorite websites, display photos and more.

You can re-arrange, disable and enable any channels in your profile. Making changes in Profile Builder automatically updates all your profiles.

This does indeed work, although I had a difficult time finding the RSS feeds for my Flickr wakeboarding photos sets that I wanted to put in my profile.

I hope that the Contact information is based on some sort of standard like FOAF.  Marc Cantor’s People Aggregator is leveraing FOAF which is good to see.

You can customize your own Channel as well. It will be interesting to see how people use this feature. Check out My Profile.

I am waiting for a more robust API and bi-directional Facebook/Myspace/Orkut profile updating, in it’s current format, it feels like I’m just filling out yet another profile, with no clear understanding of what it’s value is. This ambiguous value proposition of profile aggregator sites like Profile Builder have historically been their achilles heel and must be addressed before the services take off.

Profile Aggregator companies come and go, there have been more than a dozen since the dot-com bust and I suppose there will be a dozen more before one of them comes up with the right mix of money, resources, partners and technology. It’s exciting to see them get closer to the prize, now it’s time to make them useful, no small task.

Scoble does a good interview with Marc Canter. There are bits about his People Aggregator, social graphs (terrible phrase!) single sign-on, universal profiles, FOAF, the identity stack and much more. Conversational in tone with lots of stories and subtle jabs at certain net gods, it’s good for a run on your iPod.

Apologies for the 3.0 moniker, but blog readers are brutally selective when searching for interesting headlines.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about  identity, attention and reputation. These reoccurring themes keep popping up in my consulting work and the blogosphere has no shortage of pundits who opine about the role of identity from time to time.

I continue to think Windows Cardspace could be a central theme to open profiles, attention and identity silos. The problem is that the current state of play is that the documentation is for developers, the test suites are stale and most of the blog posts about it are almost a year old. That is definitely not they way you want to roll out a potentially enormous shift in how people are represented on the Internet.

The architects and developers will continue to evolve the underlying protocols, improve security measures and create usable browser plug-ins and manageable datastores.

I want to start talking about how identity, attention and reputation are going to change how we interact with each other, web services, communities and institutions.

I will continue to maintain partial focus on emerging internet trends and the Boston Internet scene, as we are seriously underrepresented in the blogosphere and the MSM (main stream media).

If your company participates in the identity, attention or reputation space, or you’re doing cool stuff in the Boston area, sign up for the feed and keep me updated about what you’re up to.

Have a great weekend.

Reputation systems are like social networks, they are only as useful as the amount of people in them. Rapleaf, one of the more visible reputation systems, is now displaying which social networks a person belongs to. You can use this information to quickly learn about a person before interacting with them in the real world. Useful stuff.

I got to know Auren Hoffman, consummate Silicon Valley networker and Rapleaf founder, when I was advising identity aggregator Opinity on ways to leverage the value of aggregated social networking data. A marketers dream, really.

Rapleaf + Cardspace + identity authentication = killer app. Distributed transparent silios for the data, managed via Cardspace with API connection to partners like social nets and blog comment management. Who’s going to built it?  A few have tried, nobody close to putting all the pieces together, talk about a wide open opportunity.

Rapealf is hiring offering a $10,007 bounty for software engineer referrals we hire. Inquire at jobs@rapleaf.com.

Jeremiah Owyang on Web Strategy Predictions: Facebook, Identity, Social Networks.

Facebook will launch an Identity widget that I can embed on my blog. This allows only those who have registered to Facebook to leave a comment, many high profile blogs will do this, to avoid nasty anonymous comments, thus reducing the incident of Kathy Sierra type events. Dave Winer is right.

-The data collected from these widgets ables Facebook to erode the small marketshare that Attention trackers and MyBlogLog are creating.

-Facebook will have faster adoption that Open ID, as the consumer users will drive it. (Remember the mantra of consider joining before creating communities)

More about community groups and social networking, worth a read.

Did you see the rejected Superbowl commercials for Godaddy? One particularly funny one was about two guys, one kept asking the other what his girlfriends name was, then his mother and his dog. The guy would immediately purchase their names as a domain name, to the others guys frustration.

Why do I bring this up? Macworld writes about a Symantec report that says hackers are selling ID’s and credit card numbers on the net.

U.S.-based credit cards with a card verification number were available for between US$1 to $6, while an identity — including a U.S. bank account, credit card, date of birth and government-issued identification number — was available for between $14 to $18.

Now it’s even easier to buy someone on the internet, for only $18, scary.

Last weekend I ran into Aldo Castañeda at the Barking Crab while I was on the self-guided Boston HarborWalk MP3 audio tour after having beers with Mayor Menino.

Aldo is behind The Story of Digital Identity podcast which features interviews with the people shaping the future of digital identity.

I was interviewed for Episode #29. In this episode I described what I call the Identity “stack” (my view of identity from a marketer’s perspective).

The Wall Street Journal has an article about proving online identity. Present and past clients Opinity and Trufina are mentioned.

I got a call from the writer the day before the article went to press. I wish we could have spoken in more detail, otherwise, it was a good MSM (mainstream media) article discussing identifying the new crop of companies building out tools and services to manage our online identities.

I’m looking forward to next week’s Identity Mashup at Harvard. There are not many events like this on the right coast, will be nice to connect with people who’s blogs I’ve been reading but have yet to meet.

If you want to meet up during or after the event, email me at relaxedguy at gmail dot com. I know some people are seeing Sox games and there are several dinners happening, it’s going to be a busy three days.
I added a Food For Thought session called The end of Spam: What are the marketing opportunities and implications of identity, reputation and attention systems and how will consumers benefit?

Post dinner beverages, people watching and conversation will set the tone of this GTG.
Tracks I’ll definitely be attending:

Monday

Wild and Walled Gardens: Trust, Reputation and Community Building

Disruptive Technologies and Business Models: Power Laws and Power Shifts: The End-User Revolution

Tuesday

Interoperability, Open Identity, and Identity Brokers.
(Need a doppleganger at the Mashup talk.)

Long Tail Markets, Social Commerce and Open Business Models

Towards and Open Identity Layer and Trusted Exchange: What Might it Look Like?

I’m glad to see enough differentiation between the tracks to avoid the gut-wrenching session overlap syndrome.

See you on Monday.