Online Identity Management

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of online identity management: what it means to have an identity online, what stays consistent with the offline world, what becomes more fluid, and what becomes more fixed.

It’s a very vibrant space right now, with commercial vendors, open source projects, trends, and standards all vying for attention. I’m thinking here of a couple of overlapping categories:
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Identi.ca Action Stream Plugin

Identi.ca is a new micro-blogging service which runs the open source Laconica platform.

Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all).

For now, it’s just fun to play around with.

I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin - get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page.

Here’s what the output looks like:

BrightKite, FireEagle, and Airports

I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading.
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TripIt Traveler Profiles, Action Stream

(Via the TripIt blog)

TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:

The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.

It’s got a nice, RESTful public url - mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin - the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.

You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone - but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link - just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).

WordPress Avatar Plugin, Movable Type Action Stream Plugins

Finally got around to publishing out (see Code) some things I’ve been tinkering with. Nothing major, but hopefully someone will find some of them useful.

For Wordpress, check out MBLA+, which is an avatar plugin (shows people’s avatars in comments) based on MBLA and hAvatar. I’ve been using it here and on Goatless for a while, and think I’ve got most of the kinks out, though it should still be considered beta at this point.

For Movable Type, check out Action Stream plugins for Amazon wishlists, Last.fm recent tracks, meetup profile, and a generic YourBlog template. I’ve been using these (with MTOS 4.1) over at JohnEckman.com.

I’m also working on a Twitter application using the API to turn a twitter account into a group. (All tweets by followers to a given account beginning with a specific preface get re-tweeted so that all other followers see them). Hope to have that done in time to be useful for VegSXSW (twitter).