Honestly Speaking

At Honesty Online, we recognize that our success depends on our partners. What’s so partner-centric about our approach, then?

Here are some things Honesty Online does NOT do to allow our identity verification service to be integrated into your site:

• We don’t tell the user, “here’s some HTML you can paste into your profile” and then let the user worry about whether you actually allow him to add HTML to his profile on your site (you probably don’t).
• We don’t tell you, the site owner, “here’s an API — maybe you can figure out how to make it useful”.

We have built a simple, well-documented API that has been designed from the ground up to allow partner sites to include Honesty Online credentials in their user’s profiles. We want both our partners and our users to have to do as little work as possible, while still delivering a reliable, secure identity-credential creation and sharing service. Here are some of the details:

1. Currently, our interface includes a grand total of 5 web-service calls (designed in a “REST”ful manner, for you geeks out there).
2. Our simple, patent-pending authentication protocol allows users to have confidence that a credential hasn’t been “spoofed” — no extra log-in or validation required of the user.
3. User payment can either be collected by Honesty Online or “prepaid” by the partner as part of a membership-fee bundle.
4. For partners that can exceed a relatively low traffic threshold, we offer a co-branded landing page.
5. We provide partners with images in various shapes and sizes to depict a user’s credential-status and to help up-sell the service.

What about the non-technical parts of partnership? We give partners integration help and advice, both in in the form of a Marketing Integration Guide and in phone calls and emails. We’ll provide as little or as much input as you want — from “just the API guide, please” to becoming your virtual Integration Product Manager. Whatever you feel will make you most successful.

Last but not least, through revenue-sharing, which is available to all partners, we offer a valuable premium-service for paid customers and/or “found money” from non-paying members.

It would be great to see an Honesty Online credential on every user profile on <insert social network name>. More important to us, though, is building individual communities of trust — one partner site at a time.

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