A month or so ago I talked to Fred Stutzman at ClaimID to get a better idea about what his new project was all about. The next day, Aldo was over doing a podcast here about identity. The week after that, Aldo interviewed Fred. Last week I met Fred in Person at the Identity Mashup. Today, I installed MicroID plugin for WordPress and added ClaimID to my sidebar. I use a somewhat-hacked theme for the blog which doesn’t support sidebar widgets and I haven’t taken the time to figure out what edits need to be made. Needless to say, some progress is being made at Theprogressbar.
Fred at ClaimID has two blog posts which do a good job of explaining MicroIDs. Part 1 and Part 2.
Johannes Ernst has mentioned Hans Gerwitz’s PersonCode, which appears quite similar to MicroID. Hans’s take on PersonCode is here. I can see 20 people working on projects like this with too much overlap and not enough differentiation to make separate projects worth the effort to the implementors.
The sooner a content-claim Microformat is agreed upon the better. Hashing an email address isn’t terribly difficult, it’s making the meta-data usable to regular people which is difficult. That’s if an email address is what’s going to be used as the base identifier.
ClaimID blog is worth a look if you haven’t visited Fred’s world yet. I read they are making it so you can use your name in your ClaimID links, which will be nice for the early adopters until the next John Smith wants to claim his name. Unless I’m missing something?
Leo Laporte claimed his PGP key, smart.
When this stuff is as simple as CoComment in Firefox, it’s going to take off. For now, it’s Just Outta Beta.