Manage your online identity.

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 7:42 am and is filed under Dispatches from a beta, claimID.