TechCrunch blogged about Michael Arrington’s twitter account getting verified without appearing to be verified (no one contacted him). This Mashable post may explain how this happened:

…Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website.

This is a good model for verifying a channel -  to look at a known official channel to see if it (officially) links to the channel being verified. However, it doesn’t scale beyond the celebrity use case, because the vast majority of users (like me) do not have anything that Twitter will recognize as an official channel. And Twitter will never have the manpower necessary to run an in-person verification program. But is there a clue buried in how Twitter is approaching this to how we could potentially do this at scale?

An emerging discussion in the identity space has been the topic of reputation as the basis of trust (which is what verified accounts are ultimately about). In the Twitter model, the reputation of the account is enhanced 100% because of it being cited on a well-known, officially recognized website. I recently read a Wired article about a new system for ranking/rating scientists based on number of citations as opposed to publications. Twitter has multiple (similar) variables that could potentially be used to calculate the reputation of a twitter account – number of followers, number of retweets, number/nature/participants of conversations (replies).

If these could be used to calculate the reputation of a twitter account, then you could get to the point where you could calculate the trustworthiness of an account. And then the whole “log in with your twitter account” feature that for now is only getting used in blog commenting systems could take on a much more significant role in the identity metasystem.

Tags: Identity Proofing, Personal Identity Management, Reputation Management, Twitter, Twitter Verified Accounts

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

The article does mention that the engineering team at Twitter is still trying to figure out how to do this. But no more than a day later, Stan Schroeder of Mashable pointed out one of the key aspects to making reputation work – it has to be context-sensitive with respect to the identity of the source and their authority on the subject.

Thinking about it, it seems that this reputation ranking system is far more complex than a simple combination of factors such as followers and retweets. The system needs to be contextual; it needs to recognize which tweeple are important for a certain keyword or phrase. For example, tweets from the White House, Barack Obama and politicians aren’t that useful in the context of a Gmail outage, but they’re crucial during some political event.

In other words, the reputation engine (if it is to be done right) can’t just look at the number of followers, the number of retweets and hashtags. It also can’t rely purely on the 140 character biography that all the tweeples have posted on their twitter profiles. No, to really do this thing justice, Twitter (or some other company that could step in) would need to navigate the semantic, social and identity web in a way that builds up an accurate picture of a persons authority regarding a particular subject. And it is not just based on what we put out there, but even more so on what others put out there in response.

If this feels like somebody is about to start building a credit score of our online lives, it isn’t too far off the mark. The implications in the area of personal identity management and privacy could be huge!

This highlights a change we are seeing in the personal identity space. Since there are no secrets any more (as Bob Blakley is wont to remind us every now and then), relationships and reputation are likely to become the primary variables in the identity equation. The question therefore is, what tools do we need to manage and control our online identity in light of this new perspective on identity? Is it simply about having an OpenID and clean living? What tools do the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn need to incorporate that give us control over not just what we put out there, but what others put out there about us? It’s a tough nut to crack, and should make for some interesting discussions at IIW next week. Maybe I’ll throw it up there on the board as a topic.

Tags: Personal Identity Management, Relationship Management, Reputation Management, Twitter, Twitter Search, User-Centric Identity