Microid mailing list

[Terrell Russell <terrellrussell AT gmail.com>]

I realized about a week ago that I was not actually on this list and
that I was not a part of it.

Apologies.

I led a session on MicroID at the IIW in Mountain View this past week
and got some interesting feedback.  For the most part, the people in the
room seemed to understand that this is not identity itself (unlike most
things happening with the tech at this workshop), but a simple way to
allow the spidering effect of connecting small independent claims with a
common thread (the user's communication ID).

There was also much interest in the substitution of the OpenID URL for
the email address we're using in all our (collective our, not just
claimID) live examples today.  As was to be expected.

There was a point made about the use case for MicroID if an interested
site has decided it wants to provide a way for users to 'claim' their
profiles on that site...

Option 1) Implement MicroID (with email/openid/i-name/jabber, etc)

<meta name="microid" content="e5de55ef248b5f8b06d38253cac0ae725d6455fb">

Option 2) Just publish the OpenID itself (no hashing)

<meta name="openid" content="http://mysite.com/";>
or
<link rel="openid" href="http://mysite.com/";>


The question was simply - why would I implement a MicroID if I'm already
using OpenIDs on my site?  Isn't the point of the hashing the
obfuscation of the communication identifier (to prevent spam)?  Isn't it
unnecessary if the communication identifier is just a URL?


I think the answer is, simply, we need to stick to a simple spec - and
that publishing the fact that a user has a particular OpenID falls
outside of the scope of a MicroID spec.  There is nothing stopping the
greater web community from deciding to publish something like Option 2
above - but that would not be a MicroID - it would simply be the formal
publication and broadcast of the fact that a page was
owned/operated/edited by a particular user with a particular OpenID.


Thoughts?



Terrell
http://claimID.com
http://terrellrussell.com