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.

Although the blog has been quiet, MicroID creators, developers, and users have not. As discussed recently on the mailing list, Will Norris has contributed a new PHP implementation. The core spec now appears to be stable. And Fred Stutzman, Jeremie Miller, and Terrell Russell will probably make a presentation about MicroID at the next Internet Identity Workshop in May.

More small fixes to reflect list discussion regarding the scope of applicability for MicroIDs in HTML meta tags and class attributes. Check out the latest version here.

Eran Sandler has contributed C#/.NET tools to the MicroID codebase.  He writes:

It is a bit more generic and can be used with any hashing algorithm currently supported in .NET (SHA1, SHA256, MD5, etc).  The zip contains the class MicroID with a static function to either generate an SHA1 based MicroID (the default) or specify the name of the hashing algorithm.

It also converts the text to ASCII (so the hashing will work the same as in Python, PHP, etc).

Thank you to Eran.  .

Two recent contributions to the MicroID codebase:

• Eran Sandler has completed a MicroID implementation in Python. .
• Paco Nathan has completed a MicroID implementation in Java. .

Thanks to these folks for their contributions. This means we’ve got MicroID generators ready to roll in perl, python, ruby and java. Nice stuff! If you’ve created some code for MicroID that you would like to share, please drop us a line and we’ll happily post about it.

Version 0.2 of the MicroID spec has been published here (mostly minor corrections). Feedback is welcome on the mailing list.

Our documentation guy has written version 0.1 of the MicroID specification and it is available here. Send feedback to the mailing list.

Some quick news:

• Yaniv Golan of Yedda.com reports that MicroID’s have been added to your Yedda page.  We’re very pleased to have Yedda joining the MicroID community.
• I’ve started a Wikipedia page for MicroID.  Feel free to go over, have a look, copyedit, flesh it out, whatever.  Hope that it is useful to you!

shares more great news on the MicroID front - he has completed a MicroID extension for Mediawiki.  Mediawiki is the power, extremely simple-to-install wiki that powers sites like Wikipedia and Wikitravel, Evan’s site.  Evan has implemented the MicroID extension at Wikitravel (he’s also implemented OpenID - go Evan!), so go check it out.

Very cool news from Del.icio.us and Last.fm - they are now supporting MicroID.  This means Del.icio.us joins a growing list of innovative companies, such as and that support MicroID.  Thank you to Del.icio.us and Last.fm for taking this important step to letting uses make claims of ownership over their content.