After just over two months of testing with a limited set of early partners, we are delighted to introduce the Identity.net Profile API to a larger audience of partner sites. The Identity.net Profile API allows partner sites to easily register users, automatically provide an OpenID for each user, and maintain a rich profile of attributes about users. The Profile API is easy to implement and provides a great on-ramp to full OpenID support.

For additional information, please contact us at partners@identity.net - Identity.net will review all partner applications to ensure compliance with our strict privacy and data security policies.

In this summer of superhero and supervillain movies, today’s New York Times has a chilling article about prowling online trolls and their fluid value system. This story makes a strong case for online identity theft protection (which is why we decided to offer basic, free identity theft protection).

Another key takeaway is that “almost everyone posts as anonymous” and most trolls refuse to disclose their identity. In fact, as one troll interviewed for the article said: “Ultimately trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously.” So key to identifying trolls, which the NY Times piece concludes, is to break anonymity by establishing reputation around a persona or pseudonym:

A broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas dissenters. “People know to be deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a supermarket tabloid,” says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for Citizen Media. “It should be even more so with anonymous comments. They shouldn’t start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It should be more like negative-30.”

I discussed personas in an earlier post, which is the idea behind Identity.net’s reputation sheets, or RepSheets. You build reputation across several personas — one for home, one for office, one for blog commenting, or however you choose to manage your reputation. You decide how much of your profile information you share on each RepSheet, which you can link to any site you use. What’s more, you can have your information verified by a third party, so those checking you out will know what’s true. Of course, you can also check out any Identity.net member to see what verified information they’ve shared about themselves. 

Verified identity fills the gray area between disclosing everything about yourself and the dark, anonymous places where supertrolls can hide.

Identity is not easy to define. Lots of smart people have been thinking, talking, and writing about identity for years. See Kim Cameron’s blog for lots of resources from academics and practitioners. Unfortunately, most of these definitions are indigestible by mere mortals. Identity, it seems, is one of these deceptively deep ideas. 

Dave Snowden’s takes an interesting approach. He lays out several criteria for identity — the roles you play, the “blurriness” of your identity, and how your identity changes over time. What struck me as interesting is how Professor Snowden borrows from chaos theory: “Identity in human systems is a strange attractor.” What?

A strange attractor is chaos theory jargon for a system that changes unpredictably when events change just a little. The weather is a common example — little disturbances can create big changes in the weather. As Edward Lorenz colorfully put it in 1972 when describing the butterfly effect: “A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.”

What does this have to do with identity? Well, identity is chaotic, strange, and changes in big ways on small events. For example, consider becoming a parent. It depends on a single romantic moment. That single moment not only creates an identity where none was before. It also transforms you into a parent and forever changes parents into grandparents, sisters into aunts, etc.

Of course, identity is not just limited to individuals. Groups have identities too. The American identity shifted dramatically on November 7, 2000 when George Bush won the US election by just 537 votes, or 0.009%, in Florida. By many accounts, the election swung on the design of the butterfly ballot, an ironic coincidence with chaos theory’s butterfly effect.

For your online identity, the challenge is to naturally and safely use your identity in all its complexity, and seamlessly deal with the chaotic change that invariable happens to it over time.

Your identity travels to many websites, your home computer, your work computer, Internet cafes, your phone, and every card in your wallet. So far, the burden for keeping it all straight has been on you. That’s all about to change.

Today we announced the launch of Identity.net — a website and growing set of services dedicated to giving you control of your identity, both online and offline. So, what can Identity.net do for you today? Well, to start, two things: single sign-on and verified personas.

Single Sign-On, Of Course

Identity.net supports OpenID which, for the uninitiated, means two things:

1. You can use your Identity.net OpenID at sites around the web. This means you can visit all your favorite (participating) websites without having to remember yet another username and password. Currently, more than 13,000 sites accept OpenIDs.
2. If you already have an OpenID (from sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL), you can use Identity.net without registering. As of July 2007, more than 120 million OpenIDs have been issued.

OpenID certainly helps reduce the number of usernames/passwords you’re forced to litter around the Web. But, the real power of OpenID is that it lays the groundwork for you, the user, to control how your information is shared with websites. Much more to come on that topic.

Verified Personas — we call them RepSheets

In your everyday life, you enjoy, what I like to call, various degrees of disclosure. When you’re in a grocery store, people can roughly tell (with some certainty) your age, gender, marital status, and location. But they can’t tell where you live, where you work, or much of anything else about you unless you tell them.

There’s nothing like this on the Internet. On one side of the spectrum, there are websites where everyone knows your name, all the recommendations are positive, and everyone is above average. On the other side, there are anonymous, flame-throwing blog commenters who can say anything they want without fear of retribution or damage to their reputation.

Identity.net aims to fill the breach — multiple personas linked to real data about you. On Identity.net, you have a private profile where you keep your personal data. If you want, you can have some of your personal data verified by a third party. We partnered with Trufina to verify your name, home address, and birthday. And that’s just the start. We’ll be verifying more attributes soon.

Once you’ve entered information into your profile, you can choose to share some of it on what we call a RepSheet. A RepSheet is just a personal web page with stuff that you choose to share about yourself. For example, I have a RepSheet at http://jimadler.identity.net. It looks a lot like my public LinkedIn profile — basically my online resume. On this RepSheet, you can see that my first name, last name, and home city/state were verified by Trufina. I also have a RepSheet at http://jim.identity.net, which is less formal, showing only my first name and home city/state, also verified by Trufina.

I can reference my jimadler.identity.net RepSheet on more professional sites and my jim.identity.net RepSheet for more personal uses. For example, you can link to yourself with your RepSheet link on blog post comments, social networks, dating sites. See here for the growing list of ways to link your RepSheet on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others.

For those geeks among you, RepSheets support hCard so sites can easily import the RepSheet information you’ve chosen to share (Identity.net is also a member of DataPortability.org). Of course, they can never gain access to the underlying profile information you haven’t chosen to share.

Places to Go and Things to Do

To date, there’s been great technology developed for identity (like OpenID, oAuth, SAML, etc.) but little reason for regular folks to use it. It’s like the industry is selling car keys but not cars. That’s been changing with the expansion of OpenID, but it’s been a slow process.

So the idea is to give you control of a secure, trustworthy place for your identity and a bunch of cool things to do with it on Identity.net and around the Web. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out services to do just that. Stay tuned!

I’ll be moderating a panel tonight entitled Profits & Privacy: At What Cost? for the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) . We’ll be discussing the ill-defined business and regulatory trade-offs that companies face every day as they deliver services to an online audience. We have some great speakers:

• Charlene Brownlee, Davis Wright Tremaine
• Chris Hoofnagle, Associate Director, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and Senior Fellow, University of California-Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
• Ken McGraw, Chief Compliance Officer, Zango
• Basem Nayfeh, Chief Technology Officer, Revenue Science
• Stephen Toulouse,Lead Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement with Xbox LIVE

Should be a fun event!