Manage your online identity.

We were very excited this morning to see that Brian Benzinger of Solution Watch was kind enough to profile ClaimID. Wow!

Brian hits a lot of the great points about claimID, especially how easy it is to use the service. I think that’s key: Digital Identity is such a complicated thing. At ClaimID we’re starting with the simplest and most fundamental elements of our digital identity: the links that are about us online, and building from there.

ClaimID will evolve, features will be added, but we’ll always keep the service easy to use, and we’ll always take a standards-based approach. We want to make claimID a hub for your online identity. For example, our data feeds are CC-licensed, and we include a hCard (a standards-based way for sharing your identity information) with each profile. We’re just getting started, but we think we’re headed in the right direction.

If you’re going to launch a dot-com, you’ve got to have a party, right? Well, we didn’t exactly have a party, but we did go out to dinner and send out the first round of invites.

But it was not to be! The wireless went out on us as we ate our Tiramisu and tried to send invites. We did not let this stop us, though, and the proprietor was nice enough to fix wireless for us.

It was meant to be! And for the next few minutes, we let everyone send out some invites. The birth of claimID!

It must be Friday. Five months or so since the idea was born.

We’ve sent out our first round of public invites to those of you who’ve signed up for notification. If you’re not on the list – you’re missing out.

http://claimID.com

We’re rewarding all who help us work out the kinks. Join us…

It really feels like it’s all coming together now.

What fun.

We’ll be sending out the first round of invitations to claimID this Friday. In just a few weeks of accepting email addresses, we’ve been swamped by hundreds upon hundreds of invite requests, which is stunning.

To say we’re excited is the understatement of the year.

Decode my sentence for a prize. There’s a certain cloudalicious goodness there too, which basically means Kelly rules the world.

In other news, there are whispers happening that this Friday might be a big day for claimID.

We had a nice surprise this morning when we found out that claimID has been listed by the early-alpha Museum of Modern Betas. Now that we have a blog, it seemed like a good time to list (and possibly respond to) some of the blogosphere-love claimID’s received over the past few weeks. In no particular order, here are some more posts we’ve come across.

• Entries in Life – claimID Mark Hershberger puts forth an excellent use case for claimID, and he calls me brilliant. The check, as they say, is in the mail.
• Webmarketing – claimID Sylavain Briant covers claimID, en Francais.
• The Informist – Facebook and Social Software The Informist himself, Tom Cizsek covers claimID a little.
• Web 2.0 Central – ClaimID, Online Identity Management We’re officially Web 2.0 now.
• ClaimID – Another social personality/online information manager? B.K. DeLong offers some of the earliest coverage of claimID. The interesting serendipity of this post is that it discusses Microformat. ClaimID creates a hCard (a type of Microformat) for every user, and we’re really hoping to leverage Microformats for standards-based, transportable reputation down the road.

Thanks to everyone who has covered us. Every time we see claimID show up on our Technorati watchlist, it brightens our day.

We’re three days into our private beta, and we can’t thank our testers enough for the feedback, suggestions, advice and guidance. We’ll thank you all publicly, but quickly – Kelly, Tola, JJB, Noah, Jason and Rich: thanks, seriously.

We’re hoping to build a service that really helps people. We’re lucky to be able to take on a project that has such lofty goals. Without all of you who have in-turn helped us, a lot of things about claimID wouldn’t be possible.

Sincerely, thanks. Now..time for the claimID team to get back to work

Hello, Internet.

This blog will serve as an outlet for our ideas and concerns about online identity management.

Fred and I have been thinking about the way we each internalize the Internet, its effects on us and those around us. A lot of thought has been given to those who have grown up with this technology and aren’t as impressed by (or scared of) it as we are. We’re concerned about their apparent lack of understanding and care when it comes to the permanence of the online record.

Our individual, personal “Internet presence” is something only a slice of the population has faced. This is a new area and yet, it’s an inevitability we will all face in due time. This inevitability is what motivated claimID. The world will be talking about you, both online and off, and so you might as well have a voice in that discussion.

We decided to build claimID and share our thoughts about how we see it fitting into this discussion of identity management. Eventually, we hope it will even lead to research (being students and all).

And fame and glory.

But those are later.

At least until after we get out of beta.

Earlier murmurs:

• Social Networks, Privacy, Security and the Media
• claimID is coming…
• claimID – accepting addresses for invites
• claimID preview done, I exhale for the first time in two weeks
• claimID Public Preview Wednesday