Manage your online identity.

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Dispatches from a beta, claimID.