Dick Hardt is founder and CEO of Sxipper, an online identity service. Hardt has a very entertaining speech about the next identity. First, the definition of identity. If we want to the answer what Identity is, we ask GYM: Google, Yahoo , Microsoft. That generates tons of results. Ask the German Wikipedia, and you get a very long page. One of the best answers is given by Answers.com. Identity has several faces. It helps you to distuingish one person from another. It’s about persona’s, one person can have different persona’s such as mother, wife, friend, artist etc. And you can predict behaviour based on someone’s identity. Hardt takes us in a flying presentation through all his different sides of identiy. Your have to prove your identity so many times during your life. Next, the digital identity. Nowadays it’s Identity 1.0, behind a walled garden such as Google’s, the government etc. Identity 1.0 is a directory entry.

What you actually want is an user-centric identity: identity 2.0. This identity 2.0 is an agent between you and the providers. You can get a strong check with your agent instead of a lot of less secure identity checks with providers now  (which is the situation now with all the passwords and username’s).

Hardt states six benefits of the Identity 2.0:

1. minimal passwords
2. rich portable profiles
3. portable credentials
4. agenda/delegation
5. reputation services
6. identity services

And offcourse his product Sxipper offers all these advantages, lucky us! You can choose between different identites when you login at Google, Yahoo, or fill in a form at your local service provider. A nice edge is that the templates of all those diferent forms on the internet are user-generated and shared.

See identity20.com and www.sxip.com