Shhh…BeenVerified Profiles Work as OpenID Too!
***Update 4/27/08: As of the new release of BeenVerified, OpenID is not currently supported. We are currently discussing how we would like to best implement OpenID and with the announcements of Yahoo and AOL, it seems that there are plenty of places for people to have access to free OpenID’s. If you would like us to bring this feature back, let us know!***
With the announcement today that Blogger has gone live with accepting and allowing OpenID for blog commenting; we thought we’d let our users in on a little secret we’ve had brewing for a while. Your BeenVerified Profile URL will let you log in to any OpenID enabled site! Wherever you see that cute little OpenID icon, just enter your BeenVerified Profile address (ex. http://www.beenverified.com/yourname) and you will then be prompted to enter your BeenVerified login info. Once that’s done, you will be sent back to the site you wanted to log into and you can forever use your BeenVerified username and password to log into that site, blog, and/or social networks. Remembering 100’s of passwords is a thing of the past!
So what does this mean? Well, not much right now. The truth is that we are not officially launching this feature and it’s really just an alpha testing type of service right now. There are lots of great services (nod to claimid, vidoop, and myopenid) that can allow anyone to easily use OpenID. BeenVerified is different in the fact that, the only information a user can enter into their profile must be first independently verified by a trusted third-party…meaning us 
Long term though, this has really big implications for our service. This means that anytime someone logs into a website or makes a blog comment with a BeenVerified OpenID, people viewing their comments and/or profile will know that they are who they claim to be (identity) and be able to quickly reference their accomplishments (credentials). More specifically, If a BeenVerified Profile says someone is a Lawyer/Doctor/Accountant, they are in fact a Lawyer/Doctor/Accountant. We are putting our name on the line for information that gets entered into a user profile and as such, we only do so if we trust the source that we are receiving a verification from.
With web2.0 (or is it 3.0, I forget which we are up to) the web has become about user driven content and knowing the true identity of an author on a blog is not just a “that would be nice” feature anymore, it is mandatory. It’s not just blog comments that could benefit from full disclosure, but how about Wikipedia and Google’s new service that was just announced “Knols”, that appears to be based on being able to prove a little more authority from the authors. Anyone remember the Wikipedia fraudster problem or the Whole Foods CEO fiasco? Well, those are the problems a service like BeenVerified combined with OpenID can eliminate.
We are working hard with communities to integrate BeenVerified and as more blog platforms continue to support OpenID, we will be looking into the best route to make that user experience nice and easy. Any developers or plug-in ninjas looking to work on some cool add-ons for Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, etc. feel free to give us a shout, we’d love to hear from you. For now, feel free to use your BeenVerified Profile as an OpenID and give us feedback on your experience.
The reason we are not officially announcing it and leaving it in a testing phase, is that the current process is a bit clunky (I believe this is a universal problem with all OpenID providers though) and we need to make sure the user’s experience and the way in which BeenVerified Profile’s are viewed are the BEST they can be.
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One Response to “Shhh…BeenVerified Profiles Work as OpenID Too!”
Pretty sweet…I can see this being pretty interesting down the line. Best of luck!
By Jester on Jan 7, 2008