Manage your online identity.Blogged previously, ClaimID is heading out to the West Coast for a week of sun, fun and, uh, conferences. Here’s the schedule.
Looking forward to our travels - see you there!
Volker Scheuber writes about his adventure coming to the US and getting proper ID as part of the Novell Cool Blogs. He’s here to continue his work on identity management software.
He arrives with some elegantly simple conclusions.
with my relocation to the states my understanding of identity got re-defined.
lesson learned: as long as i do not have any kind of u.s. id, i will be a suspect, no matter how good my record is back in switzerland or anywhere else. there is no such thing like global identity federation. good or bad? i haven’t decided on that, yet.
lesson learned: my identity is nothing i own. others own it for me. if they screw up, i’m screwed up. my biometrics don’t matter, my record doesn’t matter. only the record that others have of me matters and determines their actions regarding me.
lesson learned: having an identity is not enough. you need the right type of identity. the environment you are in defines what the right type of identity is. the environment you are in also sets the rules how to obtain it.
lesson learned: good records tied to the wrong identity don’t help. good records need to be tied to the right identity. records cannot be transferred from one to another identity.
All of these things are true. Identification verification is hard. Security is important. Trust is an unknown in a system as big as ours. Because of this complexity, we strive to have secure models that are hard to forge and hard to game.
ClaimID is not a complex system. It is loosely coupled.
It is the conversation the other systems are ignoring.
Mike Bijon, Moogle1, has just discovered claimID. He thinks we’ve got potential but is concerned about our users’ ability to prove stuff they claim - or rather, readers being able to prove to themselves that our users are telling the truth with what they claim.
We’re dealing with that, by simply trusting that people will continue doing their research. ClaimID should be a stop along a searcher’s journey. We’re not doing authentication of any outside data or the claims that are made at claimID. A great many of the classifications that happen at claimID (by/about) are personal and not much more than opinions.
If you already have an account, look back over your own decisions of how you classified your links. I bet some of them will strike you as strange - “I said that was about me? Hmm.”
I think Mike is wise to question how all this will work, but honestly, it should work simply because the network is so complex. Trying to control something like that is bound to fail. We’re trying to play nice.
All that said, Mike’s idea for Trustbacks is solid. It plays well with the spirit of openness and implicit complexity in our networks today - our networks both social and technical.
I’m calling the extension of the trackback system a “TrustBack” and think it can be used to show credibility on and off the web - basically a set of credentials that’s generated from all interactions with people and not just by authorship. Trustbacks should work the same way that trackbacks currently do, but they will require some additional storage, provider, or invitation system to bring non-bloggers into the mix. Also, I should be able to maintain a skill profile for my trustbacks to better show the credibility of my skills and to avoid the “list of my friends” that seems to be the core of most current social networks (Myspace, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc.).
Join Mike and claimID in this discussion. How will be be presenting ourselves online? Do we try to collect and collate and present? Or do we list skills and those who might vouch for us? All of the above?
Our friends over at Google Reader have been hard at work (still, always), and along the way have recently opened up their “sharing of labels”, or tags, to the outside world. This is interesting because it allows a new way to have your rss aggregation be sliced and diced. In fact, surprisingly, there’s no jelly.
Then there’s my Me Roll. Feed services like ours owe a lot from others’ pioneering of these uses (e.g. Feedburner’s) and I’ve found using splicing for this kind of avatar-as-feed has been immediately gratifying. I am considering pointing my auto-discovery link to the feed for my “me” label instead of this blog’s feed. There’s a steadily increasing amount of feed-serving out there so features like this help push the barrier to splicing nice and low. I’m not entirely sure what belongs in a “me” feed, however. Flickr photos, sure. My moblog, yup. My normal blog, of course. But what about the comments feed on my Flickr photos? My del.icio.us feed? My upcoming.org feed? Hmm.
Hear that everybody? Yet another snippit of what’s out there about you.
That feed of yours is being propagated, republished, spliced, and rolled - whether or not it’s got any jelly. Claim it!
The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study today regarding the growing role the internet plays in our major life decisions (full pdf). Authored by John Horrigan and Lee Rainie, the key findings indicate we’re going to the internet more and more to research very important personal decisions. According to Horrigan and Rainie, we’re using the net in greater numbers to research illness (particularly the major illness of a loved one), career guidance, investment and major financial decisions, where we want to live, and where we want to send our children to school.
We’re using the internet to support our decisions, both large and small. Notably, the survey doesn’t cover the behavior we’re most interested in - how we research each other. However, there’s plenty of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise. The internet is playing a role in the decisions we make about each other - and these decisions influence the jobs we can get, the friends we make, and our family’s opinion of us (your mom Googles you, its true). And just like we can get bum advice from bad websites while researching those major decisions Pew examined, your identity in search can be good or bad - and you’ve got no control over it. We’re trying to change this. We’re trying to give you a sense of empowerment. We’re building technology that works, that begins to give you control over your online identity. We need to start talking about these issues, and we encourage you to join the conversation.
We’re happy to announce we were accepted to the 2006 Startup School, to be held April 29 on the campus of Stanford University. Startup School will be one part of an extended west coast trip - we’ll also be attending the Internet Identity Workshop. If you’d like to meet and talk about ClaimID, please just drop us a line and let us know.
A few days ago, the Automattic team released Widgets for Wordpress. Widgets are little handy drag-and-drop tools for your Wordpress blog. We’ve built a simple widget for ClaimID users that lists your recent ClaimID links. Keep in mind, you’ll need Wordpress 2.0 or greater, with the Widgets plugin enabled. You can read more about the requirements here. To install the ClaimID widget, follow these simple directions:
If you log in to your claimID account, you can find extensive directions (in our help documentation, and in the account extras section in your account). If you’re comfortable with wordpress widgets, however, the claimID widget should be quite painless to install. Thanks to Riccardo Cambiassi for motivating us to develop this widget; if you have any problems or suggestions, please let us know. We’ll also lobby Wordpress.com for inclusion of our widget, and we’ll let you know how that goes.
Couldn’t help but notice this article on Digg this evening. One of our beta testers wrote a nice review of our service, which I’ll excerpt here.
ClaimID popped back onto my sonar after I was doing some searches manually. I am currently in the job market, and it would be foolish not to check what Google and other search engines think about me. On my search results, my ClaimID page was ranked very highly, which surprised me since I hadn’t added any links. Immediately, I began to use the service, to make full use of the highly ranked result.
It is obvious the ClaimID guys are doing some good SEO on the site, and that other people are starting to link into it, giving it some good PageRank juice. Google has changed their algorithm recently to rank higher those pages which contain your search result in the URL. In this case, my ClaimID contained parts of my name, and this combined with ClaimID’s PR of 5, boosted it right up.
I was able to put together a decent summary of my web presence in about 10 minutes using the handy bookmarklet and a couple of categories. In the future, I will probably put this URL on my resume so that employers can go directly there, and I will worry a little less about what strange things they might attribute or misattribute to me. ClaimID also conveniently caches the links that you find, so if something is moved or deleted, you have a record of what you’ve done or people have said about you.
I like this review for a number of reasons. Even though Matt didn’t really take advantage of the service after signing up (hey, there are a LOT of betas these days), ClaimID immediately went to work for Matt. When he decided he wanted to start taking advantage of ClaimID, it was there for him. Now that he’s filled out his ClaimID, he can present a more complete picture of his online identity, and get all the benefits of the useful things we’ve built into the service.
If you’ve signed up for claimID, have you Googled yourself lately? Brian Benzinger found some interesting results, and I found Emily Chang’s claimID page at position 32 (Update: 23 and dropping) in her Google results (and she only posted it a few days back). You might be surprised with what you find. In the meantime, check out Matt’s review of ClaimID, and if you’re so inclined, digg it here.
A week or two ago, Jeremie Miller of Jabber introduced MicroID, something he describes as “small, decentralized verifiable identity.” The concept behind MicroID is pretty simple: you place a digital identifier on your webpage, and people can verify that you’re the author (not unlike how Technorati requires you to embed something in your blog to claim it). Well, this sounded pretty interesting to us, so we went to work and designed a little solution that will automatically generate MicroID’s for all of your claimID links. All you have to do is click on the MicroID link, and a popup will give you a code snippet you can embed in your pages. It couldn’t be simpler. We must note, however, that MicroID is a work in progress (they plan on releasing new specifications soon), so claimID will change as MicroID changes. We really like the simplicity and standards-based approach of MicroID, so we’re doing what we can to enable people with MicroID’s.
In other news, I came across the Museum of Modern Betas top 50 most anticapated betas. The list is calculated by number of del.icio.us bookmarks, and MoMB has us down at 99. This places us at number 15 on the list, not bad at all. However, when you look up the del.icio.us links for claimid.com and www.claimid.com, our total is a good bit higher - but who’s counting? 
I presented for an hour yesterday at the UNC-SILS CRADLE symposium.
The slides are posted both there and on my site (PDF 170kB).
We had a great turnout and gave out fun buttons. Lots of good questions about current usage and uptake. We’re going to need some more metrics for measuring this stuff - now that we’ve built it, we need to count it.
Thank you, Brad, for allowing claimID a spot on the full schedule.
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