Free Your ID

Wow, when Scott said yesterday that JanRain was going to be making a cool announcement, he wasn’t kidding. Today they, along with GNR, announced a new service called FreeYourID, which provides identity services with a .name domain. This top level domain was originally setup for use by individuals in this fashion, but it never really seemed to catch on (at least from my perspective). This new service allows you to register your name (typically first.last.name), and they provide email forwarding, web forwarding, and best of all OpenID. And referencing what I talked about yesterday, they use delegation to power the OpenID component, by delegating to JanRain’s MyOpenID. As can be seen in the comments on Scott’s post, there are a few quirks in the system, but GNR is jumping right on them. In certain respects, I almost like this better than using my domain name as my OpenID… it better reflects the personal nature of the ID (by using .name), and I have the web redirect going to my ClaimID page. From there people could get to my personal homepage (here), or perhaps a more appropriate page of mine like my homepage at work.

FreeYourID is free for the first 90 days, and then $10.95 a year (at the time of this writing) after that. An incredibly reasonable price; I would go ahead and pay for the first year or two if only they’d let me – my page only includes the message “Free Trial active … There is no need to pay anything yet”.

In all, an exciting and very well implemented announcement. Way to go, guys!