Inames, OpenID and Me

I have an i-name =richard.dale which, one day, will be all you need to know about me to contact me, which I can publish on the front door of my home, but which will not allow spam. It will also allow me to log on to any website with just one password and prove that not only am I really me, but that I am over 13, or 18 or 21, that I own a Volvo, and whatever other verifiable facts I wish to promote about myself. Even more, it will allow me to point to data others hold about me with my permission which they keep up to date for me (my waist size for those selling me Chinos? my bank account number for those sending me money?).

I am very excited about the possibilities of i-names... I really think i-names, and the XRI/XDI infrastructure on which they sit, have amazing potential. At some stage i-names were enabled in the OpenID infrastructure and just now, for the first time, I went to a website that uses OpenID as a way to login. I messed around for a few minutes and found, to my great delight, that I could just enter my i-name as http://xri.net/=richard.dale, and they took it! I then used my i-name password to authenticate and I was logged in. In fact I subsequently found that they even recognise the xri://=richard.dale form. The next thing they asked for, sadly, was a bunch of personal information that should come from my iname account ... but, deep breath, one step at a time, we'll get there.

You can learn more about inames at http://www.inames.net/ and from my brother Andy, a leader in this field, at =andy.