ext337

Nov 1, 03:36 pm: Managing identity

So, I’m sitting in a meeting yesterday and we’re talking about the value of being in a community and how it has to be personal and portable and increasingly people are going to want to keep a living record of something very much like their identity and their time online and that the resume, with Google, is already an outdated model. How long before it’s purposefully replaced?

We were talking about how I’ll want a place that connects my identities and a way to be able to pull pieces of content so that I can build my online identity, on a single page with a single URL, through a wide-variety of activity on the web.

Sure, tagging and badges already make all this possible but possible isn’t easy. And it isn’t easy. It’s possible in an early adopter kind of way.

And I’m thinking about this problem and, via Lifehacker, I find FindMeOn. FindMeOn, after an exhaustive 6.5 minutes of exploration, is very early adopter but it seems to provide a way to link various identities and sites and then to allow you to port content—bits of content—from one to the other via a centralized management tool. Not sure of that bit yet. But it’s what I think.

Hell, here’s what they say about themselves:

FindMeOn is a new way to assert and verify ownership over online elements , identities and personalities. We empower you to verifiably extend your true identity across social networks and blogs, essentially creating an ad-hoc social network out of everything you join. We use cryptographically verified links to map waypoints on a “3D Social Network” or a “Social Network of Social Networks” on top of your existing web identities- helping users link together various online personalities and contacts across media and networks.

Our vision is helping you connect your Email Addresses , Instant Messenger applications ( AOL IM , ICQ , Gmail , MSN , Yahoo ) , personal blogs ( your own domain or hosted services ) , and social networking profiles ( flickr , livejournal , friendster , myspace , etc )- Securely, Openly and Verifiably , so it is easier for you to find your friends, and communicate with them however you wish.

FindMeOn isn’t a new ‘Social Network’ in the traditional sense—you won’t be using it to message people, join groups, or share photos—you’ll still use the networks you already know and love to do all of that. FindMeOn is just here to help you navigate those existing social networks easier—think of us as a bridge connecting your different accounts. We think people should be able to use whichever online services they want.

Anyone have any thoughts about this? Anything else that helps you to link your various identities — and is controlled by the user?

tagged: identity, findmeon, service, portable, link, online,