Scott Kveton

Update: For the record, credit should go to the entire JanRain crew for the creation and maintenance of Jyte over the last couple of years. I was just lucky enough to work with the crew at JanRain for as long as I did.

Brian and Dag have been working hard over the past few months on our latest service, Jyte. Jyte is our latest foray into the world of OpenID identity services.

We have been thinking quite a bit about what it means to have an OpenID lately. Now that you have this unique identity as far as the Internet is concerned, what does that mean for who you are and the people you know? The possibilities are endless but we knew we had to start somewhere.

Jyte is a simple service that allows you to associate claims, credibility and contacts to build a reputation with your OpenID:

• Claims: Claims are exactly what you’d think they are; claims about you or someone you know. They can be as random as “Scott Kveton likes Red Bull” to something more meaningful like “Gabe Wachob is trustworthy”. Users can then vote on these claims helping either confirm or refute them. Since these claims are tied to an OpenID, you could feasibly use them anywhere that OpenID is supported. We’ll have a claim widget coming out soon that will allow you to embed claims into your blog, wiki, etc.
• Cred: Jyte uses a “gift-based economy” for people interested in developing their on-line credibility. A similar reputation currency called “whuffie” is featured in Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. You can give another user cred using tags to signify that you respect their abilities or qualities in a certain area. For example, if you think your friend Jason is good at darts, you would give him cred using the tag “darts”. If you are a dart expert, and already have lots of “darts” cred, then Jason’s “darts” cred will go up quite a bit. If you have no “darts” cred, Jason will get only a small amount of “darts” cred. If you know somebody that deserves some cred, you can give it to them on their profile page.
• Contacts: As you’re making and voting on claims, giving and building up cred you’ll also be creating a list of contacts. Since these contacts are made up of OpenID’s, you’re actually creating a list of contacts that is unique for you on the web. We have a simple API for accessing these lists based on the tags you give them that you can apply to your blog, photo sharing site or wiki. We’ll be publishing these lists in other formats such as XFN and FOAF in the coming weeks. For example, if you wanted to test to see if a certain user was a member of your contacts or also an avid gardener, you could query this via the API and apply it to do access control or whitelisting on your blog. See the contacts page in profile page to read more about the API.

OpenID is more than just single sign-on. OpenID is allowing users to do more with their digital identities than they could before and we’re excited about the possibilities. We hope you like Jyte and feel free to give us any and all feedback on the Jyte Blog. Spread the cred!