Well, the cat’s on its way out of the bag about TypeKey. Yesterday I figured out that TypePad members can use their logins for the new service. They can then go and use their TypeKey identities to comment on pages running MovableType 3.0 beta.
With your login, you can also go into TypeKey and set up your profile and account preferences. (Again, TypePad users can use their current login and password. New users can sign up for new accounts.) For TypePad users, all the fields will already be filled in with your personal information. Using the new nickname feature, you can decide to have your full name or nickname displayed when you leave a comment. The Profile Page settings let you build a public TypeKey profile. Here’s mine. The options are: photo, email address, one-line bio, my websites, and sites I enjoy. I have not included the last two options on my profile because they’re a little broken right now. The fields come automatically filled out with information from your TypeLists, which is a handy idea, but at the moment it’s a little buggy. It seems to like to fill out one field for every list item you’ve ever entered into a link list and it repopulates them if you delete them. I can’t fault them for this of course, since TypeKey is still in testing and they haven’t announced TypePad functionality yet. Once it works properly it’ll be neat to have your blogroll already imported.
The feature that was really clever of Six Apart is that, though login names have to be unique, nicknames do not. If you want to be “sexkitten69” or “toker420” or “31337h4x0r” when you leave comments, you can set that to your nickname no matter how many other people have it, too. This will solve the handle scramble problem that happens when new services pop up.