Announcement

I of all people should have done this before but I was waiting for OpenID 2.0 to be out there and working so I could use my i-name. I went to Ma.gnolia today and it just worked. They have a great way to integrate an OpenID with an existing account. I hope that I can pull over my delicious bookmarks. I joined the Identity 2.0 bookmark group.
I found some interesting sites

Wikidentity is a Flash client that shows you any hCards in a page you are browsing, and allows you to search for hCards that other users have helped index. You can also export hCards that you’ve discovered to use in a variety of applications, such as Address Book.

hCards are nice but I am not about to post mine on the web for anyone to scrape.
Unit Structures latest recommendation to Social Network Designers:

In the past, I’ve done a good deal of writing explaining how to design better and more relevant SNS. Today I offer designers of social network sites my single most valuable piece of advice: Adopt OpenID.
The walled gardens will stay with us, but walled gardens in social network sites need to be a thing of the past. Imagine the pitch – you can add friends from any OpenID network to your SNS. This has huge, democratic possibilities. This feels natural for SNS – walled gardens don’t. If you’d like to find out more about OpenID, you can refer to this primer I wrote about it on the ClaimID blog, or you can email me and I can help put you in touch with folks who will be able to help you. Once you grasp OpenID, and see how naturally it works with SNS, you’ll see what a valuable direction it is to take your product.
OpenID is coming – the tipping point grows closer each day. This is a tremendous opportunity – and I do hope you’ll consider it seriously. This is the way of the future.

The thing I don’t like so far is that it doesn’t make recommendations the way Delicious does. Maybe this is a forthcoming feature.
I found this article by David Kerns on reputation and trust that points to Clippinger’s blog. He has not posted since 2005. According to the social physics site he has a book coming out next year. Interesting. I wonder if Doc can convince him that blogging ideas and parts of the book and sharing with them the community might be a good idea. It seems that if markets are conversations books certainly are. As Kim learned with the Laws of Identity getting community input was a good idea for everyone.
The importance of Annonymity being baked into our systems is highlighted by Ben Laurie:

Firstly, when I say anonymity should be the substrate I am not just talking about the behaviour of identity management systems, I also mean that the network itself must support anonymity. For example, currently, wherever you go you reveal your IP address. Any information you give away can be correlated via that address. People sometimes argue that this isn’t true where you have a dynamic address, but in practice that isn’t the case: most dynamic addresses change rarely, if ever – certainly they tend not to change unless you go offline, and the rise of always-on broadband makes this increasingly unusual. Even if the address does change occasionally, you only need to reveal enough information in the two sessions to link them together and then you are back to being correlated again.
Secondly, people seem to think that privacy is an adeqaute substitute for anonymity. I don’t believe this: privacy is all about voluntarily not linking stuff you could link. Anonymity is about making such linking impossible. Microsoft’s Cardspace claims to provide anonymity where, in fact, it is providing privacy. Stefan Brands comes close with his selective disclosure certificates, but they are still linkable, sadly. These systems only provide privacy if people agree to not make the links they could make. Anonymity provides privacy regardless of people’s attempts to undermine it. That’s why you need to have anonymity as your bottom layer, on which you build whatever level of privacy you can sustain; remember that until physical onion routing becomes commonplace you give the game away as soon as you order physical goods online, and there are many other ways to make yourself linkable.

I do sense that this is not being thought about enough. I hope that Stefan can participate more actively in the community so that we will address it more fully.
I found this post by Bokardo a social web designer. He has a post on Domain as Identity and the services behind it. I totally agree and I can’t wait for him and others to discover the cool things they can do with XRI and XRDS. The TOTH (Thrill of the Hack) experimentation has just begun 🙂
I would encourage you guys to join Ma.gnonlia – for two reasons one it is OpenID2 enabled AND it has cool group bookmark sharing features.