This is the third in a series of application reviews - VRM Labs app catwalk. Our source are applications that are seen, claim to be or are mentioned in connection with VRM which are then reviewed according to VRM-based criteria. Suggestions of applications that you wish us to look are welcome. adriana dot lukas at gmail dot com. We aim to one every week.
For many VRM is associated with identity. I also often talk about how my ‘identity’ is scattered across the web in dozens of platforms and services. There are at least two types of applications trying to address that: Online business card services applications such as idLasso, retaggr, MeedID etc. and activity streams such as FriendFeed, PlaxoPulse, Twitter, Facebook news feed etc.
In this review I will look at the three above mentioned ‘online business card services’ together, as they have many commonalities and are all meta-identity* (note about what is meta-identity) related - idLasso, MeedID and retaggr. What is their purpose? Do they help me join up my online presence?
The three services offer varying level of functionality, from linking (MeeID) to pulling together (idLasso), to consolidating (retaggr) the various social web apps I use.
idLasso gives you something to take away and embed it in your own blog or site. MeeID is provides a link to lists of places you ‘frequent’ on the web, no less, no more. retaggr, on the other hand, brings you to their platform (although it gives you plenty of ways of distributing your profile cards across yours and others’ sites and blogs).
IdLasso
Technically speaking, I’d say that idLasso is a widget not a card - in the sense of MS cardspace a card is a representation of a item of data that can be transferred or used as part of a transaction. In the sense of a business card, it could pass as one - it allows you to ‘leave’ your contact and online information in a place. idLasso is also skirting the edges of social ‘graphing’ - by putting together my social web services in one place and allowing me to compare that list with those of my contacts and friends. As Mike Butcher puts it:
And if you add your friends on idlasso it’s possible to see which networks you are connected on and those that you’re not (but could be). This makes it easier to fill in gaps in your social graph.
IdLasso is open to ‘importing’ data from other web services - Flickr, Twitter and theoretically many others, more accurately inputing data. I didn’t have much luck adding them though.
There is a nifty option of using a regular username that you have used across many web services and see what services turn up. You can then add those at a click of a button, which will take you to the service in question and ask you to authorise idLasso. When authorising it to add my YouTube account, I can only hope it was using OAuth to do so. 
screenshot of youtube authorisation
Adding YouTube worked but Digg and many others haven’t. There seem to be three categories of web services status - verified, unverified, and unverifiable. This is what their FAQ says about that:
Q: I don’t understand the verification of accounts, can you explain it?
A: When we add accounts we try to verify that they can only be yours (a verified account). If an error occurs during verification or you decide not to allow idlasso to connect to your data on the 3rd party site then the account is added as unverified (ie it can be verified but hasn’t been so far). Verification is not possible on all services so we add these accounts as unverifiable. We are working to make all accounts verifiable.
Q: I can’t verify account x, any idea why?
A: For some services we rely on an API to authorise your account. If the 3rd party website is experiencing problems then we may not be able to verify your account at that time. Simply try again later.
For example, I tried to add my Dopplr account and other of my commonly used webservices, but I cannot work out why some of them show up on my card and some don’t. Even after finding this list of idLasso-friendly web services I couldn’t work it out.
Adding Facebook to my idLasso services, I encountered the same problem as with adding my chi.mp updates to Facebook [link]. I am using Firefox with cookies enabled, though third-party cookies are not enabled. I don’t believe they are needed. And yet, I keep getting a message that I need to enable cookies in my browser. See below:
screenshort of facebook authorisation
Importing contacts from Twitter only threw up two contacts both of whom I couldn’t recognise, so didn’t add to my idLasso ‘friends’.
As for export of data, there is none. It may not be a big deal as the only function of idLasso is to generate ‘cards’ to with your various web services accounts to put on your blog or site. Still it would be nice to have a way extracting a piece of XML with a documented structure that describes what my different login names are. So the data is as locked up as it would be on Facebook. You can have a idLasso card on your blog but it doesn’t mean you can get at your data.
In term of data crunching, it would be nice to get some value out of putting all that information there, and idLasso enables me to create more than one card. I assumed that that means I can selectively remove or include web services for each card. That doesn’t appear to be the case. So I must ask, what’s the point? It appears to be all about visualisation, the look and feel of the ‘cards’ and ability to generate blobs of code to publish and share the ‘cards’ on the web, which seems to be the only value added to the data.
The data types are mostly your identity data, or what I would call meta-identity*.
The attitude to data ownership is demonstrated by lack of access to your data in open and exportable format. There is a delete button in a visible place on the profile page.
The privacy statement contains the following section on data sharing.
idlasso.com does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies except to provide products or services you’ve requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:
* We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with idlasso.com under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help idlasso.com communicate with you about offers from idlasso.com and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
My reading of this is that idLasso can give access to your information to anyone they want, er, their ‘trusted partners’ who then ‘help’ them communicate their offers to you. The kindest interpretation of this is that they may want to engage a PR or marketing agency to help them talk to you. What worries is their ‘marketing partners’, a term which could cover a multitude of sins and many opportunities for spam.
Contact is via an email feedback@idlasso.com and the name of its creator and his idLasso card are on the About page.
The payment model is free, business impact remains to be seen. As for relationship, idLasso is a service around my relationships with others, there is no relationship with idLasso as such other then displaying link to it on your ‘cards’.
MeeID
idLasso and MeeID seems to be historically and closely related. The technology behind the ‘cards’ used to be called meecard and was adopted for idLasso.
MeeID is attractively simple. A landing page with graphical explanation of what I am about to build for yourself. Another page with 10 empty fields where links to my various blogs and profile pages go. Open or closed service, blog or dopplr, the links are useful - if they are public, you’ll see them straightaway, my blogs, flickr, del.icio.us or twitter page. If they are closed, you know where I am and find me on dopplr, facebook, linkedIn etc.
screenshot to my MeeID
My only gripe is: why only 10 lines? I have at least 5 blogs that I might want to link to plus many web services that I am using. Surely it’s not enough… can I add more fields to the ‘card’?
MeeID doesn’t pretend to be than an aggregator of your online existence or data streams. At best it’s an index of them. It don’t import nothing, it don’t need to export nothing… Though being able to download a blob of XML with an index of links would be nice for my further use.
It doesn’t need authentication or authorisation, it is entirely user-driven, though minimalist, meaning I add what I add, no more. Alright, you can’t embed any pretty badges or widgets anywhere but you can link to it. It bypasses the usual confusion of meta-identity with identity - it clearly deals with what is meta-identity, i.e. shortcuts or links to my real identity which is the stuff I generate, publish and distribute.
So I stand corrected, it’s beautifully simple. And it does what it says on the tin.
screenshot of home page
Retaggr
What is retaggr about:
- Unifying your online profiles. Bring all your profiles on all your services into one place, so the world can find out who you are, and connect with you.
- We’re not another social network. You already have your profiles all over the web. We help consolidate your identity.
- We give you a bunch of tools to do so. Retaggr widgets, badges, an email signature, the Add-Me-Button, and of course, your rich, interactive Profile Card.
Profile section is where I started. The usual info gathering - I am becoming slightly allergic to those fields that ask you to ‘Write a few lines about yourself’ - I’d rather link to something of mine that shows you who I am. It has a status field, which can be populated via Twitter or other ‘microblogging services’.
The profile section has 11 tabs. Websites You Use seems to be the crucial one for adding web services I use. Various web apps are divided into the following sections:
screenshot of retaggr web services
The list is very comprehensive and adding web services is straightforward, provided you remember all your usernames. I like the way you know immediately if you entered a wrong username and there is a helpful link next to each field to identify the correct format of your username. If something is missing you can let retaggr know.
Add a link to any profile you have elsewhere on the net. We’ll try grab an icon for it, add it to your card, and do what we can to get a widget.
In the next tab, you can add your blogs - name, URL and feed URL. Annoyingly, if you leave the feed URL field empty, it doesn’t allow you to edit the entry after you publish it, so I had to delete it and then do another one with all the info complete.
The next tab is widgets that you can add to retaggr. I decided to try for a TripIt badge and although I managed in the end it wasn’t straightforward. I first needed to get some code from TripIt and until I turned on the ‘blog tripit badge’ within TripIt itself, it really wasn’t obvious where I am supposed to get the code from. But that’s UI on TripIt side not retaggr’s. For comparison I also tried a Dopplr badge, and again I had to enable it on Dopplr site but the explanation was clearer. There were also more options to control who sees what (note: I particularly liked the option that allows only those logged onto Dopplr and in my network tosee my trips in my blog’s Dopplr badge).
screenshot of Dopplr badge
But that’s for another review. Finally, I tried a Facebook badge, which was easiest both in terms of implementation as well as in terms of setting up what is displayed on it.
screenshot of Facebook badge
The next tab was Professional, which was about my work details. I added The Mine! Project and when it came to industry allocation, I was faced with those drop down menus I so hate. Why would an online web savvy service just copy one of those dry, incomplete and inaccurate list of industries from about the turn of the last century with a bunch of technology sectors bolted-on is beyond me. Yes, yes, I know about taxonomies and abillity to categorise people according to industry will allow someone search or use that data further… But users rule and I want to be able to describe what I do with tags or in my own words. The Mine! project is an open source project and I wasn’t going to allocate it ‘Computer Software’ industry. I chose Internet - ponderous but closer.
The next tab was Affiliation, i.e. professional entities you are associated. I added VRM Hub, uploaded the graphic we use on the site and wiki, URL and done.
The next tab was More details that presented a pull down menu with a few more details you might add and they would be displayed in About me section.
The final tab was More with question about what’s missing and how they can help to include it. Nice.
An exhaustive and exhausting compilation of all your online and offline bits and pieces about you. One minor gripe, what retaggr calls a widget is called a badge by others. Just thought I’d mention it.
The next big section in the top menu was Profile Tools - these are ways for me to display, enable or distribute retaggr through embedding my profile on my site, customising a retaggr widget to display on my blog, getting a click-to-add-me-button to my profiles everywhere. I can even have a retaggr generated email signature.
screenshot of profile tools
Next we come to People. I couldn’t think of anyone other than Mike Butcher from the circle of my contacts who I was pretty sure would be registered with retaggr. And I was right.
screenshot of contact card
In the Other Services section, there is a cool functionality that allows you to ‘compare’ what you use with somebody else. I did that with Mike’s web services:
screenshot of comparing services
A bit of an unfair comparison as I was scraping the bottom of the barrel adding every service I could think of for the purposes of testing. There are some other services such as GreaseMonkey Scripts, recommendations of the most popular services and ability to email and ping your card.
As for data ownership, there is no way to get stuff out. Data crunching is mainly display and visualisation of my web services and other details in your Profile Card and Profile page.
There is no community or network within retaggr that I can see, nor sharing via feeds that I can see. Selective sharing doesn’t seem to be possible, though displaying information on the badges had some privacy or selective sharing options in Dopplr and Facebook, which is not retaggr’s merit. Retaggr is strong on web publishing in many and varied ways - profile card, embedded or in blog sidebar, badges, email signatures, retaggr enabled blogs and sites etc etc. I can delete the account:
You may completely remove your retaggr card from all retaggr enabled sites by terminating your account.
There is plenty of opportunities and invitations for feedback and contact - in fact, when twittered that I was working on this review I got a reply by a member of retaggr team offering help with any information I might need. Kudos for that.
Their privacy policy states:
Retaggr.com collects your email address as part of the retaggr service. We will never rent or sell your email address. We hate spam as much as you do.
Retrieving information from third party accounts:
If you choose to allow retaggr to interact with third party systems you will be requested to provide login information for this third party account. Your password will not be stored on the retaggr servers and will only be used for the request.
Any details retrieved will only be used to automate your use of retaggr and will never be shared, sold or rented.
Their explicit attitude to data is:
We take your privacy seriously and you are always in control to decide which of your details should be visible on your public retaggr card.
Retaggr is free, not sure how they use your data. I assume that the partnerships with other platforms to whom they add value are the budding business impact/model, which is not visible yet. It seems that, quite rightly, retaggr is focusing on such partnerships and on getting as many users as possible to retaggr-enable their blogs/site.
Recently we’ve been hard at work increasing the number of sites that automatically attach your retaggr card. [...] a partnership with comment mega-service coComment. This enables retaggr cards on the coComment site itself, and on the extensive network of sites and blogs using the service to power their discussions.
When you interact on a coComment enabled blog, or take part in conversations which are powered by their system, your retaggr card will be automatically attached to your contributions so people can easily see who you are and connect with you.
This is all part of our plan to grow the retaggr ecosystem. We’re working hard to bring retaggr to more sites in the near future.
To conlude, Retaggr, idLasso and MeeID are platforms that own my data i.e. the data I generate through my interactions with them. They offer functionality that is useful to someone who feels they need to offer an aggregated representation of their online presence across many web services. I am missing the ability to export or extract the blobs of JSON or XML which represent the list of other sites where I have accounts. Ultimately, Retaggr, idLasso and MeeId are siloed and not owned by the user - which is still the prevailing Web 2.0 model - and the information you share from Retaggr, IdLasso or MeedID is on an all-or-nothing basis.
The online business card services aggregate my meta-identities, mostly for the benefit of others. The goal I presume is that, not unlike Gravatar http://en.gravatar.com/, the benefit of Retaggr, idLasso or MeedID to the user is that he or she only has to amend that information once and it propagates to all the places that have access to the card.
Note*: I often see logins and passwords to various sites and platforms described as “identity”. I don’t think of them as my identity, but as things that I currently need to access bits of my scattered identity, at best they are my meta-identity. I see usernames/passwords/handles/GUID in general as meta-identity or shortcuts to my identity. Just like passport or driving license is not my identity, merely a proxy for it vis-a-vis a particular kind of system or record. More here and here
