If you haven’t heard of Videntity, you may recognize it as the major force behind my landing page.  If you don’t have an OpenID, you can get one from Videntity.  If you have one already (like me) you can log in using it.

Then, you can associate a profile with your OpenID.  Yes, you’ve done this a million times before.  Videntity is different — you can actually import your existing profile from elsewhere if it is done using hCard.

You can also add friends to your profile on Videntity.  Here again, the service is different.  You are not bound to adding people who have ever used Videntity — anyone with a URL can be added.  Full XFN vocabulary is supported.  This powers the primary friends list on my home page.

Enter the bookmarklet.  I have written a bookmarklet that works cross-browser.  Click it, and it detects hCards and Facebook links on the current page.  It presents you with a list of these people it has detected and lets you either click over to their profile (useful in itself) or add them to your Videntity profile as friends.

So, drag the following to your bookmark bar and watch the magic!

http://singpolyma.googlepages.com/videntity-bookmarklet.js'; document.body.appendChild(js);})();">Videntity Bookmarklet

Yet another experiment in following the community.  I have used the toolbar-creation tools from Conduit to create a social toolbar for the Blogger hacks community.

The toolbar has links to all the major Blogger hackers (if I forgot you, I’m sorry, tell me and I’ll add your link!), a drop-down to the main sections of the hacks wiki, a built-in search of the wiki (the co-op one isn’t allowed… but I linked to it), a feed-reader that alerts your when a hacker posts something new, and an announce section for community-wide alerts.  There is also a chatroom, email notification, weather, and pop-up blocking option.  All components are optional.

One of the really cool things is that there is a version for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  If I update the toolbar components on their site, everyone’s toolbar gets updated, without a reinstall.

So, check it out at the toolbar homepage.