Getting social with your online identity

The foundation for security and enterprise management

There seems to be a push for more personal control of identity information. Two companies I came across at the recent Digital ID World show exemplify this.

Sxip Networks, now a-year-old, is the brainchild of Dick Hardt. Hardt also founded ActiveState, a leader in open source programming languages and anti-spam software, which was acquired in 2003 by U.K.'s security software company, Sophos.

Midentity, only slighty older than Sxip, grew out of the fertile imagination of Simon Grice, a co-founder of eTribes, which specializes in online communities. Grice appears to like capitalizing the second letter of words.

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There seems to be a push for more personal control of identity information. Two companies I came across at the recent Digital ID World show exemplify this.

Sxip Networks, now a-year-old, is the brainchild of Dick Hardt. Hardt also founded ActiveState, a leader in open source programming languages and anti-spam software, which was acquired in 2003 by U.K.'s security software company, Sophos.

Midentity, only slighty older than Sxip, grew out of the fertile imagination of Simon Grice, a co-founder of eTribes, which specializes in online communities. Grice appears to like capitalizing the second letter of words.

Both Sxip and mIdentity provide a way for an individual to share personal identity data in a fine-grained manner. Today, we'll look closely at mIdentity and examine Sxip in the next issue.

The Midentity product reminds me in many ways of the late, lamented DigitalME project Novell launched some years ago, as well Novell's more recent (but still dormant) personal directory project (http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2002/01331333.html).

At the Digital ID World conference, each attendee was invited to fill out a personal information document (complete with picture) and publish it on the Midentity network for the show. This allowed attendees to contact each other and see their picture to identify them if they needed to meet.

The full-blown product mIdentity software (downloadable from the Midentity Web site http://www.midentity.com/download/download.htm) installs on your Windows desktop and interfaces with your Outlook and mobile phone address books. Any Midentity-enabled contact in your address book is then automatically updated whenever that user changes information that is published. You can, of course, choose which information to publish to any given user.

In many ways, this is similar to Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/) or LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) and other social networking apps that try to keep contact information accurate and useful. That certainly reflects Grice's eTribes background but he has bigger plans than simply up-to-date address books. As he says, as long as you're sharing e-mail addresses, home page URLs and phone numbers you could also be sharing presence information (whether you're logged in or not), location and conversations.

Much of what's currently available for Midentity, and much of the discussion on the Web site, is geared more towards finding people with your cell phone. That was the genesis, but Grice has grabbed the concept of directory-based services very well and envisions much more to come in the way of service oriented activities for users. He's coming from one direction, while a number of electronic provisioning companies that I spoke to at the recent Mobile ID Services show, are also discovering that people want to be able to locate services through identity applications using personal profile data along with phones that have GPS functionality.

You can download and use the Midentity client for free, although there are more extensive services available for a subscription fee as well as an instant messaging application so that you can chat with your contacts.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.