Just a strange thought I had this afternoon, based mostly off of a report I’ve been drafting (on the market opportunities of demographically-specific technology addictions), which highlights some interesting points:
Everyone on the internet uses email.
I’ve played around with http://identitu.de, which takes your Facebook account, and turns it into an OpenID. Which is wickedly cool – if you have a Facebook account.
But what if all you have, is email? Could we take email accounts, and verify them (using IMAP or POP3), and present THAT as your digital identity?
I think we can. Watch this space for my attempt.
#1 by Brad Pauly on 19Sep08 - 8:54 am
Yes! This is the one thing I don’t like about OpenID at the moment. Email should be all you need. Good luck!
#2 by Jeff K. Ward on 21Sep08 - 10:46 am
What a great idea, do it!
I think there is a barrier to entry for mainstream internet users to think of their login credentials as a URL. I look forward to your attempts (let me know if you need some extra cycles for some UI!).
The closest I could get was pointing a CNAME for jeff.animikii.com to MyOpenID – which is coincidentally similar to my uhm, real email address.
#3 by Bruce Giovando on 13Nov08 - 2:35 am
http://emailtoid.net/
#4 by admin on 13Nov08 - 11:21 am
See, emailtoid snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. They *almost* did the right thing.