hans.gerwitz

A few years ago I was musing about the need to “tag” online resources with personal iden­ti­fiers more secure than email addresses and less exclusive than URLs, and thought it might be nice to encourage the use of mailto: URI hashes as in the FOAF spec as “secure enough” personal iden­ti­fiers. “foaf:mbox_sha1sum” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I coined the term “PersonCode” and went so far as to register personcode.com, hoping to build an identity aggre­gator that would freely inte­grate and let the user own their own data (a seem­ingly novel approach in 2002).

Of course, I’ve never finished baking that idea, and have always assumed we’d see some­thing like that take off, with Anil being excited about FOAF and all. Since then everyone’s gotten all 2.0 and under­stands that users want to own their own content and playing nice with other services brings ecosystem benefits, but we still end up kludging together identity with manual aggre­gators like SuprGlu and have great stan­dards for Identity 2.0 with no real adoption because they’re solving hard problems that require nonzero effort for user adoption.

MicroID is great for veri­fying ownership, but not for discovery or mash-​​ups. Gravatar’s MD5 hashed email address is the closest I’ve found in the wild to a PersonCode (as a content-​​generating user, I don’t have to do anything but provide my already-​​required email address), but that’s a very specialized niche.

What I want can be described by a simple scenario: I enable “publish my PersonCode” on my plazes profile. Later, I login to Yelp, who knows my email address, and they make a request to plazes asking for the location of PersonCode 1e2998da88a2c4fe1eef13c013bffbf3bca2c3a8. If plazes had never met me, they wouldn’t have learned a new email address; however, since they have they can respond and Yelp can use the answer to offer a “near here” search option.

So, there’s still a need without a killer app. Maybe we can talk Jeremie into marking the publi­cation URI on MicroID optional and supporting its use in this manner, although that’s arguably a dilution that would complicate imple­men­tation of its core intent.

I’d also love to see tagging stan­dards for RSS/​Atom, and a place for it in hCard so it could be used within hAtom’s author field.

(Credit to Morten Frederiksen’s sha1ify for gener­ating my PersonCode.)