Manage your online identity.

A few days ago, we rolled out ID Selector at ClaimID. Designed by the wonderful folks at JanRain, ID Selector is a nifty technology that makes the OpenID sign-in process significantly easier. Here’s what it looks like:

The ID Selector makes it easy to recall your OpenID when you’re logging into a site, solving a plethora of problems that occur when OpenID’s proliferate.  We know this will make it easier for you to log in to OpenID, and we also hope that this will drive some more of that sweet OpenID-consuming that is required to push this movement forward.

If you’d like an ID Selector from your website, simply sign up with IDSelector.com.  Great work to Brian and Co. at JanRain!

The past year has been an exciting one for OpenID. Millions of OpenID’s have been created, thousands of sites support OpenID, and a growing ecosystem of fans, developers and advocates are proving that an open approach to identity makes sense. As the network of value around OpenID grows, our OpenID providers need to be trustworthy and secure. ClaimID has long been one of the most trusted OpenID providers on the net; while we offer banking-quality security, we felt it was time to take our product to the next level.

To do so, ClaimID will integrate Confident Technologies RecognitionAUTH system. The RecognitionAUTH system offers users an innovative and highly secure second factor in authentication. This enhancement will solve many of the criticisms of the OpenID security model, providing you with an account you can use with confidence going forward.

We’re excited to be working the the Confident/Vidoop team on this integration, particularly our friend and advocate Scott Kveton. In enhancing security, we hope ClaimID users will feel more comfortable, and more secure as they choose us as their identity provider. We hope to deploy RecognitionAUTH soon - so watch this space for more details.

We heard from Alex Kohlhofer (plasticshore) a couple days ago about Weewar adding MicroID support.  We checked it out and everything seems to work flawlessly.  Great work guys.

We’ve added weewar.com to our list of autoverified domains (aka Known MicroID Publishers) and hope to continue seeing that list grow!

For completeness… Alex’s Weewar profile

Some great news from Micah Laaker of MyBlogLog - they’re now supporting MicroID’s on their profile pages.  If you’re a MBL user, you can now claim your page to ClaimID or any other service that supports MicroID.  Awesome!

Thanks to Adam Rice, who pointed out that our ClaimID Wordpress widget wasn’t valid XHTML. He sent along a handy fix, which we’ve added and uploaded. You can download the latest ClaimID Wordpress Widget (zip file) here . Thanks Adam!

There’s big news from the OpenID foundation today: Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the foundation’s board. This is obviously a major step forward for OpenID, but it’s also good for the entire open identity movement; the major players are seeing the value in consumer choice and control. At ClaimID, we’ve been advancing these themes since 2005, so it’s especially rewarding to see this news. From the OpenID foundation announcement:

By bringing on these companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to better serve the needs of the entire OpenID community. In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe. Awesome!

Congratulations goes out to OpenID foundation chairman Scott Kveton, and all others involved in the foundation who’ve worked on this initiative. Scott’s blogged the coverage of the announcment if you’d like some more insight. Again, congrats to the OpenID foundation for this huge achievement - today is a very big day for OpenID and open identity work.

Cross-posted to Unit Structures.

Another feather for MicroID - and another automatically verified link for many of the users here at claimID.

This morning, Digg announced publication of MicroIDs on every user profile:

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

Again, just like last week, please check the list of Known MicroID Publishers and make sure your links are in the right format. Those trailing slashes are tricky sometimes.

Another notch on the MicroID belt.

Today we add Plaxo to the list of Known MicroID Publishers. Welcome, Plaxo! And thanks Joseph!

You can see it in action in the head of any page with the pattern http://NICKNAME.myplaxo.com/.

Plaxo will create and publish a MicroID for each of your verified email addresses in your account. You need to visit your settings page and claim your NICKNAME.

When you come back to your claimID account and claim your Plaxo profile page, it will be put in the verification queue automatically. Please note that since MicroIDs work with math done on URLs and identifiers, the URLs must be exactly correct. Please make sure that your myplaxo.com URL has a trailing slash when you enter it at claimID. (This also goes for the links pointing to Last.fm).

Another small step to taking over the world. We should congratulate ourselves.

The news today from Yahoo that it will be providing OpenIDs for all of their user accounts is a welcome sight.

Yahoo has been in attendance at the IIW for a while and been planning this for some time. Congratulations on getting the scale and legal issues worked out. And welcome!

Read more at openid.yahoo.com:

Once you enable your Yahoo! account for OpenID access, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled web site that you are a Yahoo! user. You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password and then signed in to the web site. Its that easy!

They’ve got a nice easy explanation of the technology for users in addition to a ‘tour’. The developer network gets a page also. Very clean implementation, well done guys.

One interesting bit about their particular set-up, which will go live at the end of January - you only type yahoo.com into an OpenID box, not your full identifier. Yahoo will do the authentication and then bounce you back to the relying party. An interesting design choice - it will be interesting to see if that practice gains traction.

Update: This “yahoo.com only” is the directed identity feature of OpenID 2.0.

Another issue that’s generating some questions among ClaimID users is how to control one’s nickname when posting an OpenID comment to blogger. The nickname is what shows up as your name in the comment. Here’s are two examples of OpenID comments; the nickname is “Fred” in one, and “This shows up” in the second comment.

To accomplish this, first I leave a comment with my OpenID URL:

Once I do this, I am sent over to the OpenID server for authentication.  As you’ll notice, it asks me for some information:

Blogger is asking for your nickname, which is what will show up as your name in the comments.  As a test, I’ve given “This shows up” as my nickname.

Success!  Now I can control what nickname shows up when I comment.   Note, if you choose “Log in and Trust” this will set your nickname permanently unless you revoke Blogger’s trust, which you can do by managing your profiles at http://openid.claimid.com.