MicroID Development

Great news from the folks at Wink, the social search engine. They are now supporting MicroID - as a producer and a consumer! This is really exciting because it is only the second instance I know about of a company being a consumer. Consumers are incredibly important because they become the “hubs” of identity, allowing you to create verified places. For example, Wink can now claim all sorts of MicroID-enabled pages, but it can also claim other consumers, such as ClaimID. When a consumer claims a consumer, it creates a very cool identity trust chain - all of the trust that comes from the claims at consumer A are transferred to consumer B, the claiming consumer. Very cool! Here’s what the folks from Wink have to say:

The second method of verification is via a new open standard called MicroID. MicroID is a simple and easy verification system that more and more services are adopting. Last.fm, Ma.gnolia, Wink, ClaimID and others for example. Without getting too technical, these sites put some encrypted MicroID code in the header of their pages that includes your verified email address that you use for that account. When you verify the same email address with us and add one of your accounts from these services, we can run a check to that site to see if they match. We also provide you with your own MicroID code to place in other sites that you can control. So if you own a blog and can edit the template, you can get a MicroID issued from us and place it in the header of that site. Then when you claim that site, we can verify it as being yours. Whew… It’s really not that complicated, so don’t worry.

Great news! See everyone at the upcoming IIW in May.