=wil

William Tan’s i-name page.

You most probably got here by clicking on an email signature or web link that looks like: http://xri.net/=wil

http://xri.net/ is an XRI proxy — a service that bridges the lack of XRI-aware applications today. So, anytime you see an i-name, you can immediately use it by putting http://xri.net/ in front of it:

http://xri.net/   +   =wil   →  http://xri.net/=wil

An i-name is an abstract identifier that identifies an entity. That entity could be a person, company or organization, or even a service. Some even go as far as to suggest that you can use them to identify animals but as my colleague Ivor pointed out: “Cows don’t need i-names — you can simply assign inumbers to them.”

inumbers are not fictitious, by the way. You just don’t hear about them because we didn’t want our early adopters to freak out (as if these ‘=’, ‘@’ aren’t weird enough). When you register an i-name today, you’ll automatically be assigned an inumber.

What happens when you resolve an i-name is that an “XRDS document” is retrieved. In a fully resolved XRDS document, the list of services available is most immediately useful. It describes services such as the OpenID endpoint, your contact page, blog, Skype ID... pretty much anything you want to tell the world about.

Here are the services I have in my XRDS:

• Contact page
• My OpenID URL
• This page

The last service was configured to be the default service if you did not specify what type of service you are looking for. You may also choose to make your contact page the default service.

The FoXRI Firefox Extension has moved to Sourceforge, click here to go there.

Resources

Below are some links for more information about XRI, XRDS, i-names and i-numbers:

• Main inames.net site
• dev.inames.net developers site
• List of official i-brokers from which you can register your own i-name
• FAQ on XDI.org - the trust organization that oversees XRI efforts
• My blog post on “What’s in an i-name?” — a gentle introduction to i-names

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