Digital ID Coach

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records, tools digital identity, federation, id management, identity management, identity provider, login, protection, records, security, single sign-on, SSO, surveillance, trusted parties

Tools: chi.mp

November 27th, 2008

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Chi.mp (pronounced like the monkey) is a content hub and identity management platform that has two unique twists. First, you can get a free .mp domain that is portable, meaning you can install that domain name–and your contacts–elsewhere if you wish (though there are reasons you may not wish to). Second, they have a contacts management system in development that will allow you to implement layers of identity according to categories that you create and assign to each of your contacts.

Where do your contacts come from? They’re imported from many of other existing accounts, like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. In fact, once you’ve identified certain accounts (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook) you can display your “feeds” (what you’ve posted on your other accounts) on your chi.mp-hosted page.

For example, check out Rob Farrow’s site (farrow.mp/). Rob is the VP of Marketing and brand czar for chi.mp. I don’t think he’ll mind if I use his site as an example here.

The left column shows tiny icons for Rob’s contacts, and below that is where to find him on the Internet and how to reach him. The right column starts with a brief bio, then shows where Rob has been active lately (his feeds). The feeds are listed according to when he posted them, so if he drops a picture on Flickr then tweets it (on Twitter), his feed column will reflect that.

Unlike Vidoop and Verisign Labs, chi.mp does not offer a function to manage everyone else’s passwords. Chi.mp takes the position that you won’t need all of these passwords as they’ll all be replaced by the ability to login using your OpenID. Your .mp domain is your OpenID.

Chi.mp is currently in beta, so getting an account (domain, access to their contact import and management tools) is limited. If you’re interested in getting hooked up, sign up to be notified when that becomes possible.

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tools contact management, Facebook, Flickr, identity management, login, online identity, openID, passwords, Rob Farrow, Twitter

Tools: Verisign Labs Personal Identity Portal (PIP)

November 26th, 2008

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Verisign Labs offers a beta version of Personal Identity Portal (PIP) to “manage your online identity without compromising your privacy.” Verisign, the mother ship, offers SSL certificates to make sure web sites have appropriate trust credentials. With PIP, Verisign is also boosting their “trust” model: use your PIP identity to access web sites, protect your identity, and share your profile data.

Using PIP

First, create an account with PIP. As with other identity providers, your user name becomes part of your OpenID. This account is like others: you’ll need a user name and password.

PIP offers a Firefox plugin that makes signing in to certain sites easy. Verisign says the “sites include Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many major retailers.” (Amusingly, they call it an OpenID Seatbelt. Huh? Keeping me safe in my chair?) The plugin remembers your user name, but you’ll need to provide the password when you use it.

PIP lets you create your own identity page(s). When you’re done, PIP allows you to see your OpenID page with a carousel of your various sites:

In the Help and Support area, there’s a video on setting up your personal identity page. (These guys didn’t make it easy to find more information about their service. They have an FAQ and more videos about how one click (a password manager) works in the Help and Support area.)

Once you’ve set up your various services, you have a nice carousel that people can flip through and click on to visit that site.

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tools identity management, login, online identity, openID, passwords, security, SSL, Verisign Labs

Tools: Vidoop and MyVidoop

November 26th, 2008

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Vidoop offers myVidoop to help people manage their passwords and fill in online forms. Filling in forms is a form of identity management. For instance, are you filling in a form to purchase something online? or to log into your work computer? The information needed for each transaction might be different (for example, addresses).

Vidoop also offers password and identity management solutions for businesses. Those tools will be covered in a future post.

Using MyVidoop

First, create an account with MyVidoop. Your user name becomes part of your OpenID, which you can use to easily create accounts and log into other services that recognize OpenIDs (such as this site, many blogs, perhaps soon: AOL, Yahoo, Google (who interestingly offer OpenIDs but don’t recognize other services!), and more.

Vidoop has an original way of dealing with passwords. They use an image grid, called an Image Shield, that contains pictures in certain categories, which you pick out when you set up your account. Once you give Vidoop your user name, it generates a grid like this.

You identify the pictures that correspond to your categories. In this grid, we might have picked the categories of cars, cats, and dogs. There are examples of those three along the bottom row. In the box below your image grid, you enter the letters corresponding to those categories: BDJ. Vidoop has a demo on their Image Shield.

Note: I set this up for an older friend of mine who was not very familiar with the Internet. He keeps wanting to click on the pictures, which often lead him to an advertisement or related website. For example, if he clicked on the car, it would take him to a car website. Not so good for him. He got pretty frustrated with this and wanted to change all of his logins and passwords to the same thing. (Not possible for a number of reasons.) He is learning that using myVidoop is easier than the alternative.

Once you’ve gotten access to your account, you can store information on various online accounts and various identities (for example: 1) your work address and phone, 2) your home financial information, and 3) your leisure or gaming identity). In fact you can store and access passwords for lots of sites, including sites that don’t yet recognize OpenID. This is a feature worth checking out, as it allows you to access all of your passwords from any computer (though Vidoop will check to make sure new browsers are ok, and will log the access).

Here are videos to give you more information about using Vidoop and getting started.

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tools identity management, images, login, myVidoop, openID, passwords, Vidoop

Google Apps: Problems with Identity

November 20th, 2008

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CNN is running an article, The hidden cost of Google Apps, which describes a familiar problem. Seems that due to the combination of cookies, “remember me” settings, and other hidden recall devices, users have a hard time using Google Apps for more than one user, more than one account, or more than one application. This is a serious problem!

The author laments:

The confusion gets worse if you share PCs. For three months, Google Talk was convinced that I was Nick, my assistant. We finally figured out that we had shared that test computer – he had once logged in as himself on the machine that I was now using, and logging in as myself to Google Apps hadn’t cleared out that setting in the browser’s memory. We had to fully wipe the cache to allow me to switch back to … well, me.

Linda, my head of operations, had her personal Google Calendar account swapped for her business identity on my Google Calendar about the same period. Until we figured out the goof, she missed a bunch of meetings. And to this day, after more than six months of using Google Apps, I still get e-mail invitations addressed to Dan, our intern. Somehow, Google thinks I am him. He missed last week’s meeting in part because he never got an invitation.

This problem represents a shift from using your own computer to do all things, to using your computer to do context-sensitive things. For example, are you doing things for work? Personal use? for someone else? You had better remember to stop and log out each time you want to change your context, or better yet (as in Google’s case), never use more than one computer for one user and one purpose. (Ouch!)

Coaching moment: This is another example of a push to define and keep separate our relationships between home and work computing. In practice, our lines are blurred. Have you ever checked your home email while at work? Many people have. Has it ever happened that someone that you know sent an email message from the wrong account? While the learning curve is steep and harsh, the separation isn’t always a bad thing.

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