Identity Future

From the website:

MicroID is a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.

In a sense, MicroID is a simple technique to wrap any existing communication identifier in a generic way and enable it to be uniquely and safely published in association with some content. The technique works while protecting privacy and remaining fully decentralized. This applies to owners of sites and pages, and just as importantly, for services that host content generated by users (blog posts, blog comments, forums, videos, account profiles, url lists, friend lists, and so on). These services can add a MicroID to the user’s content (and microformats!) and enable that user to verify to anyone that it is theirs.

There is no new or deep technology involved, simply take a current communication id such as an email address and hash it with the name of the site it will be published on…

A sample hash generator is available, as well as examples of how it can be used to to verify a user’s ownership of web content, user’s membership in a third party site, or to validate a user’s feedback or reputation on a moderated system.

identity, identity architecture, identity assertion, identity management, identity verification, idm, microformats, microid