A couple of months ago on this blog, we introduced a new identity management project that Open-Xchange has been promoting together with a couple of other key players from the domain name industry, namely 1&1 and Denic. The project's objective is to create a new, public identity infrastructure for the Internet, allowing companies to provide consumers with online identities that can be used for login into any website or service, and freeing customers both from the need to remember dozens of usernames and passwords, and from the dependency on the few big social networks that currently provide a similar service, though in a closed and non-interoperable manner.
We are glad to announce that the project has now got its final name, ID4me. It also has a website at id4me.org, and we invite you to use it as a reference to learn more on what we are doing and to keep in touch.
More importantly, OX and the other partners decided to launch the establishment of an international association, based in Brussels, to take care of the development and adoption of this new platform. ID4me is meant to be an open standard, and we want to be sure that it gains broad support; we want to involve more companies into the discussion, listen to their suggestions and bring the idea forward together.
It will take some time to complete the founding process, but we are calling for all telcos, ISPs, hosters, registries, registrars and other parties that want to provide Internet-scale identities and single sign-on credentials to their users, and that want to keep online identities open, privacy-friendly and interoperable. It will soon be possible to become members of the new association, and it is already possible to join the working groups that are being established, and to start experimenting with the implementation and integration of the new standard into products and services.
If you want to know more, just contact me at vittorio.bertola(at)open-xchange.com or write to info(at)id4me.org. This is an ambitious but important attempt to keep the Internet open, and to make it easier and more secure for the final users: you should not miss the chance to be a leader and an early adopter.
