# Wired Labs Exploring new forms of personal identity on the web - Team: Cora Kyler (CEO), Alena Titova (co-founder) - Founded: 2024 - Invested: 2024 - Links: [Website](https://www.wiredlabs.so), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cora-k), [X](https://x.com/alenatitova_) - Field: Making and talking ## The problem: What would a web profile look like if it were really yours? ### How identity works online Most of who you are online is a pile of accounts. Every site wants its own login, and by one survey the typical person has 100 passwords. There is a name for the feeling this produces: password fatigue. Two standards cut the pile down. OpenID lets you log in to many unrelated websites through a third-party identity provider, without a separate identity and password for each. OAuth handles delegation: it lets you give an app access to your information on another site without handing over your password. The "Sign in with Google" button, known as social login, is usually built on OAuth. Identity online is also a place. The early web was mostly individuals and their own personal pages, and GeoCities, which gave away free home pages, was an important outlet for personal expression. On MySpace you could change the background, look and feel of your page. Then social media sites began replacing personal sites, and search engines began to deprioritize the independent ones. ### Why it is hard **Borrowed front doors.** If you want one identity that follows you around, you mostly have to lean on a few large identity providers, like Facebook or Google, and they control the information tied to it. The alternative is a new account with every service, which fragments your experience of the web. Neither option leaves you in charge. **One key, many locks.** Social login trades convenience for risk. Relying on one account across many websites creates a single point of failure, so if that account is hacked the damage spreads. Sites that use it can also pull in your name, email, hometown, interests, activities and friends, which raises its own privacy questions. **Homes that vanish.** When a platform holds your page, it can take it away. GeoCities was shut down by Yahoo a decade after buying it, and its sites survived only in an archive with broken links and images. A profile on someone else's service is a rented room, and the landlord can sell the building. ### What Wired Labs is after Wired Labs has said little in public so far. As we describe it, the company is building a personal space on the web where your profile reflects who you are, "not an engagement surface designed to maximize time spent." The product is profile-first: people build around their interests, taste and context instead of posting into a feed. The larger question it is working on is what it would take for digital identity to feel personal again. ### Still open Can you own your name without owning a server? A decentralized identifier, or DID, is a globally unique identifier that can be verified without a central registry, and is designed to be decoupled from identity providers. The catch is usability. In the AT Protocol, DIDs are the long-term identifiers but they are opaque and unfriendly for humans, so people go by a handle: a mutable, human-friendly name in the form of a domain name, linked both ways to the DID. Can the personal homepage come back? The IndieWeb movement never gave it up: independently hosted personal sites that are built around the person rather than search engines or other metrics, and vary widely as a result. Much of it lives on hosts like Neocities, which set out to revive the free hosting GeoCities once offered. ### Words used here - **password fatigue**: The strain of having to remember too many passwords for too many accounts. - **identity provider**: A service, such as a big email or social network, that vouches for who you are to other sites. - **OAuth**: A standard that lets you grant an app limited access to your data on another service without sharing your password. - **OpenID**: A standard that lets many websites accept a login from one outside identity provider. - **social login**: Signing in to a website with an existing social media or email account instead of making a new one. - **decentralized identifier**: An identifier you control and can prove is yours without asking any central registry. - **handle**: The readable username people see, which can change while the identifier underneath stays the same. ## About Wired Labs Wired Labs is building a new kind of personal space on the web — one where your profile is a reflection of who you are, not an engagement surface designed to maximize time spent. The product takes a profile-first approach: users build around their interests, taste, and context rather than posting into a feed. The company is working on what it means for digital identity to feel genuinely personal again. ## Sources 1. [Password fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_fatigue), Wikipedia 2. [OpenID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID), Wikipedia 3. [OAuth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth), Wikipedia 4. [Social login](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_login), Wikipedia 5. [IndieWeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb), Wikipedia 6. [GeoCities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities), Wikipedia 7. [Myspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace), Wikipedia 8. [Self-sovereign identity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity), Wikipedia 9. [Decentralized identifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier), Wikipedia 10. [Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/), W3C 11. [Handle](https://atproto.com/specs/handle), AT Protocol 12. [Portfolio](https://pebblebed.com/portfolio), Pebblebed