We Have Public Beta!
February 25th, 2006 - Terrell RussellIt 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.
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.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
ClaimID is really intriguing. I like the core idea, but I’m curious about what seems like the most important element: The ability of ClaimID to have a role in the outcome of, say, a search on my name. What is the eventual result of annnotating and categorizing the information about me that’s “out there?” Does my ClaimID page end up high in the search results, or do my “official” pages, wherever I claim them, get pushed up above those that I haven’t claimed? The biggest obstacle seems to be the potential problem of fighting against existing inertia: What if the top hit for my name is something I want to disavow? (Follies of youth or some such…)
Just a few thoughts. It will be interesting to see how this works.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Just an update to my comment, of a more practical nature: The site is *slick*. Really well done.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Alan,
We’re hoping the search technologies work out how to realize these pages are extremely relevant. We’re working with the assumption that they’ll just ‘get it’, if not now, then eventually. The search problem is hard, but there are a great many very smart people working on it now. We think it’s our job to give them better well-formed, directed fodder to ‘find’.
The conversation that’s happening right now regarding identity online is all about whether we can trust it – trust the computer to know someone is who they say they are. This is great – once it works. Until then, it is implicitly not good enough – we still have to fall back on whether the contextual information is great enough to get over the bar of ‘trustworthiness’ for whatever transaction is being considered. Buying a car on Ebay is different from buying a hat for mom on Ebay. The bar is a bit higher and we need more context to convince ourselves the transaction will go through without complications or loss.
We think claimID provides this context in a way that is new and helpful.
And yes, slick is fun. Thanks.
February 27th, 2006 at 7:45 am
I think it’s a novel idea and I wish you guys oodles of success. Congratulations on a successful launch!
February 27th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Thanks Jay! We appreciate it.