Went to Saul Klein’s OpenCoffee event in London today, it was an amazing crowd - entrepreneurs, VCs and journalists from London and surroundings. Result - awesome networking with very clued in people.

There is a lot of talk about identity, and people kind of instinctively get the notion of an address space for identity. Ever since we started and launched .name in 2002 we have been waiting for this kind of mindshare of online identity. I believe people have now spent enough time online to see the need and value of a portable, personalized identity. The time is ripe for the identity space .name.

Great news this morning, our OpenID partner for the YourID Registrar toolkit, JanRain and Scott Kveton just made the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 list. This is great news and really validates our belief that Digital Identity and single signon is finally going mainstream. We at .NAME will be there to personalize all the identities

Congratulations Scott and everyone at JanRain.

–geir

The Future of Web Apps is in London again and there have been some amazing presentations here. We are talking a lot about .name and OpenID here and meeting great people who have thought a lot about digital identity.

Simon Willison (we have to get him a .name address mentioned FreeyourID.com in his OpenID presentation to the audience today. It is awesome that .name is seen as a natural bundle for OpenID services.

OpenID seems set to take off - and with a .name, a person’s openID, like his/her personal .name email address, becomes portable, personal, memorable and lifelong.

FreeyourID.com has something for everyone - openID for the advanced, domain for people with a website, and the personal, lifelong email address for everyone!

At the Future Of Web Apps conference in London today, digg.com announced support for OpenID. Quite a few blogs are already reporting this techcrunch.com, GigaOM, Scott Kveton and Sam Sethi

This is the latest of a number of announcements the last few weeks of support for OpenID from AOL, Microsoft and a number of others. We at .name announced our IAM toolkit with OpenID support late January and the first implementation of this can be found at FreeYourID.com.

–geir

ISC is reporting a spam that may have been sent to WHOIS contacts containing a PHP script that the user is asked to upload to his/her servers. The spam claims to contain a security update and the end user is asked to upload a PHP script into their web root. To me this is a new tactic requiring the user to actually upload a payload onto their servers, i wonder how successful this vector was.

Possibly due to the enhanced protection of the .NAME privacy protected WHOIS we have not had any reports of this spam being targeted at .name users.

–geir

A domain name on its down does not do much - what good is it to have a personalized, memorable and lifelong address if friend and family can not visit the address or send mails to it?

Enter Pageflakes - Pageflakes is a service that is offering a slick and simple way to create a personal page. It uses components or “flakes” to puzzle together content from around the Internet and present it all on one page.

It’s a perfect fit for .name - a great address needs a great service, and vice versa. So we’re partnering with Pageflakes, and their service will become an option for all users in our IAM toolkit, and conversively, a .name will very soon become an option for all pageflakes users as an address for their public page. Pageflakes has gotten a Registrar for the fulfillment and it will be live shortly.

It is a very exciting partnership and we hope and believe it will be enjoyable for all Registrars, resellers and users of our IAM tool.

We have been getting a few reports in today that users forwarding to Hotmail email accounts from .NAME are having issues apparently being blocked for policy reasons. We have noticed a slight increase in bounce activity from Hotmail starting at about 10:00 GMT this morning.

We have notified Microsoft using a few channels but have had no response yet.

Update: We still have no ETA on when this issue might be resolved. A workaround is to re-point your forwarding to another provider (for example Gmail, Yahoo, etc).

Update 15/2-2007: We have still not heard back from Microsoft, and are now trying ot use other channels to get in touch with the relevant people there. We will post an update here as soon as we know more.

Update 16/2-2007: Microsoft got back to us this morning, and we have provided them with information that hopefully will get them to remove the block of our mail servers in their system.

Update 19/2-2007: Mirosoft removed the block in their system yesterday, but it looks like three of our MXs are still sometimes hit by the Symantec Brightmail filter. We are currently trying to get this resolved with them as well.

Asbjorn

There are so much buzz around OpenID these days and we at .NAME are really exited about the larger players finally joining in (see Scott Kvetons post on Microsoft Cardspace and OpenID here). Looks like the big guys have finally understood that a “closed” digital identity system will not take off and become the global standard for ID management on the Internet.

Lots of groups have previously tried to solve the ID issues online. Just think back to the Liberty Alliance and also Passport, both perfectly acceptable systems, but also both too closed (or percieved to be closed) to get real take-up outside the core providers taking part.

A number of companies are working hard at providing the backends for OpenID management these days. JanRain.com is one of them, their solution can be found at Myopenid.com.

We offer our registrars a toolkit for .NAME that will assist in creating a really cool, fully integrated personal ID experience online. The solution gives you a personal email address (peter@morgan.name), personal URL (peter.morgan.name) and personal OpenID. We have also decided to let the Registrars offer a 90 day free trial - check out one of the free offerings at freeyourid.com. The OpenID backend provider we partner with for freeyourid.com is JanRain and their myopenid.com solution.

This toolkit also integrates with Pageflakes to give you a fully customised public and private webpage.

After you have signed up, go to one of the sites that have enabled OpenID logins (ex. ma.gnolia.com) and log in using your OpenID. Seeing how you login with your OpenID and how YOU are in charge of your identity is a real eyeopener.

–geir

The nominating committee at ICANN is now looking for a number of individuals to assist in ICANN’s technical and policy coordination role. If you feel you could be qualified then go to this URL.

–geir

Running global Registry services takes some serious horsepower, even for a Registry like .NAME. I can only imagine how much processing power, bandwidth and global redundancy is needed for the .COM and .NET zones.

It’s great that the provider running most of the Internet is really gearing up for all the growth we all are expecting over the next 10 years.

Take a look here for VeriSign’s latest release on their infrastructure upgrade.

–geir