Manage your online identity.

Terrell and I submitted a poster to JCDL a few months back, and we’re happy to report it was accepted. JCDL is being held this June 11-15, right in our hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. If anyone who stumbles across this blog is planning on attending JCDL, you’ve got to drop us a line so we can go grab food and beer (or at least share some advice about the area). For a small town, Chapel Hill offers a ton of great eateries, music venues (looking at the Cat’s Cradle calendar, I see that Davendra Banhart is already booked for a June 12th show), and cultural attractions.

Our poster is entitled “ClaimID: A System for Personal Identity Management”, and the accompanying paper can be downloaded here. For those familiar with claimID, there’s not really anything new in the paper; we’ll be certain to post the poster here once it’s completed. Here’s the abstract.

In this poster, the authors describe a system, claimID, that enables individuals to create representation of their online identity. Realizing that online identity, especially personal identity as represented in search, is difficult to collect and verify, the authors propose a system that enables individuals to collect and self-classify the information that is about them online.

We’re looking forward to an interesting conference, hoping to talk to lots of smart folks about claimID, and generally praying it won’t be too hot. See you there!

Doctored slightly and cross-posted from Fred’s blog.

We’ve rolled some new features into claimID this afternoon, so hopefully you’ll give us a poke and let us know what you think. First, a number of you asked for a simple way to add your claimID hCard to your blog or webpages. We’ve added a simple widget that will let you cut and paste code, and easily create a hCard on your site that will link to your claimID page. In the near term we’re going to work on a way for you to create a more robust hCard - but we’ve got to figure out a way to do this simply. We’re all about microformats and letting folks have them effortlessly.

We’ve been keenly watching search engine performance at claimID, and we’re very impressed. You might even say that the results are exceeding our expectations, which is a good thing. Taking this a step further, we’ve made it so that you can now define the information a search engine presents in its snippet about your claimID page. (The snippet is the little bit of text beneath the link in search engine results) Of course, results will vary, but its nice to think that when someone searches you, you will have some level of control over the snippet they see.

Finally, we were impressed by Jeremie Miller’s MicroID project. This kind of thinking - empowering users with usable, negotiable solutions - is the kind of thinking we need to embrace to create truly user-centric identity solutions. Yeah, I know, a lot of Web 2.0 buzzwords in the last sentence - but the simple fact is creative thinking like this will lead to collaborative, usable solutions. Hopefully you’ll be hearing more about MicroID here on the claimID weblog in the future.

Brian Benzinger of Solution Watch, who is one of our favorite people - he graciously covered our beta very early, and very positively, has updated his profile of claimID. Rather than trying to sum it up, I will just excerpt Brian:

Update (03/13/06): Looks like ClaimID is starting to work! I’ve gotten some referrers to my sites already from it and seems to be working as ClaimID said. Here is a screenshot of Google results for, Brian Benzinger - no quotes.

Not bad for just being active for only a couple of weeks. Solution Watch comes up first, one of my old sites second, and then ClaimID. If someone in search visits the ClaimID, they can then find all sites related to myself and learn who I am. Some were skeptical and questioned how helpful ClaimID really is. Well, here is proof that its working - for me at least. Nice work, ClaimID.

We’ve been monitoring the search engine effects of claimID, and we’re quite excited with what we’ve been seeing. On March 8, I wrote a little bit about the search engine effect on my blog; while we’re still in beta and it is too early to talk conclusively about effects of claimID, we’re obviously very pleased with what we are seeing so far.

I’ll be heading out to San Fransisco from April 30-May 3, primarily to attend the Internet Identity Workshop at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum. The event is graciously being put together by Kaliya Hamlin, Doc Searls and Phil Windley. I’ve bookended a little time onto the trip in case anyone would like to meet and discuss claimID, identity, or pretty much whatever else. If you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a note at fred at claimid dot com (or post to the comment thread), and I’ll be in touch!

After a few weeks on the road, we’re happy to be back home, getting back to work. First, a feature update: we’ve added the ability for you to specify XFN data for your links. XFN is an open standard for semantically describing relationship data for your links - but trust me, it only sounds complicated.

We’re pretty enthralled with making claimID a place where people can easily use open, standards-based ways to describe the information about them. To that extent, we’re currently exploring making the hCard feature more robust, and we’re exploring OpenID for identity verification. I don’t want to promise too much, but I think you can say we’re moving claimID in a good, standards-based direction.

We’ve recieved a few bug reports regarding claimID and older Internet Explorer browsers - we’re on the case and we’re working to resolve the issue.

Finally, I wrote a piece on my blog that I feel sheds a lot of light on the motivation behind claimID. Rather than cross-posting, I’ll boil it down to the essence. Identity and the web is a growing information problem, and it is up to us to start building creative solutions. It is imperative that these solutions benefit the long tail of users, because this is a problem that many of us will face.

I’ve been hard at work today passing out overtly web2.0 business cards with rounded corners.

The first keynote today was by Jason Fried and Jim Coudal where each shared their thoughts on their successes and the place of the creative in today’s economy.

Jim Coudal shared his firm’s 3-point criteria for taking work. 1) Is it good stuff? 2) Will it make money? 3) Will they learn something new?

He feels that small firms really have the ability to learn quickly and be effective globally.

The curious will inherit the Earth.

Jason Fried had a lot to say about software development and how success is bred by starting on the side. Obscurity will protect your failures - embrace it. You can fail quietly and make your next product better.

Less is good. Less Time. Less Money. Less Software.

Don’t be clever with the software - we don’t need any more complexity. Do what’s simple and do it well.

Develop under the following model: Fixed Time. Fixed Money. Let scope fall where it may. Release it and add features later.

Software that forces a user to think and reorganize their worldview has the potential to change the world, but more than likely, it won’t. Use your users’ models as is and leverage what they know already. And keep it simple.

ClaimID has been doing this all from idea to beta. It just makes sense. We’re doing one thing only. We like to think we’re doing it well.

If you’re interested in tracking what people are saying about claimID, we’ve included a del.icio.us feed on the left side of our blog. It only includes the last 40 stories, so if you’re interested in seeing the full picture (in interest of disclosure, we bookmark the good and the bad), you can go to del.icio.us/claimid.

We’ve recently pushed our first major update to claimID, which is loaded with lots of the very useful adjustments you’ve requested. We’ve added more granular control over how you describe and share your links; in turn, we’ve opened claimID to a much greater international audience. The international response to our service has been phenomenal - and it clearly illustrates to us how mindful we need to be of the fact digital identity crosses all boundaries: geographic, culture and language.

At the same time, we’ve made it easier for you to date your claimed links. This is incredibly important; for many of us, the stuff in Google’s cache’s will still be around in ten or twenty years. It is absolutely imperative to give date context to stuff about you online - I’m living proof. If you Google my name undergrad CS assignments from like, 1998, come up. I still don’t know if I want to claim them or just keep pretending they aren’t there and that UNC will one day take them down Regardless - dates provide important context to our footprints in the digital sand, and I hope they prove useful.

We’ve also reworked documentation, made the new-user process easier to understand, and have made it easier for search engines to index your claimID page. We want you to get the most value out of claimID, so if there’s something you think we should be doing better, please drop us a line at info at claimid dot com.

Finally, thanks. Thank you to the thousands of people who have come to claimID over the past week. Thank you for testing, poking, using, praising and complaining. A special thanks goes out to Luca Conti, Ottmar Liebert, Chris Messina, Yun Kyung Hwan, Matt Herbison, Craig Bovis and Canton Becker, all guilty of providing us great coverage or feedback. We really appreciate it.

As of today, we’ve been in beta for a week. It has been an incredible experience, and we’re extremely grateful to all the folks who’ve tried claimID, blogged about us, or passed along invaluable feedback. Thank you!

One of the interesting things about beta is invite collection. We’ve been taking email addresses for a few weeks now, and we’ve noticed some trends. As a matter of oversimplification, we present a breakdown of just where our invite requests are coming from.

Gmail is the clear winner, with Yahoo Mail and MSN following, but not nearly as closely as one might expect. Our n is pretty large, but not as large as we’d like ;). Sign up for a beta invite at http://claimid.com.