Manage your online identity.

When we started claimID, we were newbies to the field of digital identity. We learned that identity - for being a relatively intuitive concept - is anything but simple in the context of digital information. Digitally, your identity is not only the picture you create of yourself, but it is the picture others create of you. What’s more, your identity is also your access key to commerce, social applications, government information.

Andy Oram has written a fantastic article in which he explores the many areas of identity - what they are, how they interact, and why you should care. Written from his experiences at the identity mashup conference (which ClaimID attended), Andy presents an interesting, multiplex view on this increasingly vital conversation about identity. You’ve taken a very important step toward managing your online identity by caring about claimID, I hope you’ll enjoy this article.

You can now log in to LiveJournal, TypeKey and Zooomr with your ClaimID URL? That’s right! If you’d like to leave comments on someone’s LiveJournal with your ClaimID, just log in and use “http://claimid.com/yourusername” as the OpenID url. It’s the same with Zooomr, just log in with your ClaimID and you can create an account without creating a password.

Whoa. That’s cool. Our first step towards verification was the addition of MicroID, so you can verify your pages to your ClaimID. With the second step of OpenID, you can now use your ClaimID to log in places around the net, and you can verify other OpenID’s to your account. You can really start to build that trusted web of identity.

We’ve always said that ClaimID wasn’t going to be a typical veified service. We didn’t want your social security number or your fingerprint. We knew there was a better way. With MicroID and OpenID, ClaimID users can create real, verified identites without having to mess with the kind of info that thieves like to steal. The best part is, we’re just getting started. This is getting kinda fun, isn’t it?

It’s finally live and I’d like to take this opportunity to announce we’re leaving our beloved beta.

Our registration form is now ready and willing to take your information and create a new claimID account. Come on in.

However, if you already have an OpenID account somewhere else on the web (LiveJournal, MyOpenID, Verisign’s PIP, etc.), you can create an account here without needing a password. We’ll still need to verify your email address - but passwords? So last year.

A small community has already begun to grow around our user base and we hope to add to the ranks in the coming weeks. We’ve got mailing lists for users and developers to communicate with one another and with us.

We’re going out of our way to be open and forthcoming with everything you see at claimID. Identity is too important to play games and it’s too personal to cover with ads. Join us and help make claimID better.

Anyone see those ninjas this time around? Love that.

Since we rolled out MicroID verification, we’ve seen lots of people using the service. That’s so cool - we’re really thrilled to see it take off. At the same time, we’re also more than willing to admit that our implementation is kind of hard and limited. It’s hard because, well, you have to edit a page to add in your MicroID, and it’s limited because there are lots of pages you can claim that you can’t necessarily edit - like your flickr or del.icio.us page. Naturally, we decided it was time to solve this problem.

Before we delve into particulars, take a second and think about how you trust things on the web. You trust your friend’s sites because at one time or another they said “Hey, go check out my Flickr pictures”, or they sent you an email with their del.icio.us links. That’s how we trust people in real life, too. You meet someone, ask them where they went to school or how many siblings they have - trust has to start somewhere. When you meet someone new, you don’t completely trust them. You learn from them, verify, and renegotiate your trust. This pattern happens cyclically until you decide they are the kind of person you wouldn’t mind having for a roommate, or the kind of person you wouldn’t loan twenty bucks to (my grad student mind state slips though again).

Well, so that’s how we do things on the web, too. But on the web, things are a little different. We’re global, we can’t always look each other in the eye, we need things like https and PGP. We want a level of verification - a way to actually prove that things are part of our production. Using the MicroID, we create a web of trust. When you take your ClaimID and verify your sites with MicroID, you’re creating trust relationships; if someone trusts your Flickr, why should they trust your claimID? Well, if you verify your Flickr to your claimID, you’ve just created bi-directional trust. People can enter the web anywhere, and transverse your trusted web - rather than create a single place of trust, you’ve decentralized - an idea that makes a lot more sense than just asking people to trust you at face value.

When we dropped MicroID into ClaimID, we thought that it was a neat way to give people what they wanted in terms of link verification, and not a lot more. But as we’ve gone to the whiteboard, thought about it, talked to people about it, scratched our heads and gawked at the simplicity of it all - we realized that MicroID could quite literally change the social nature of trust on the web. These are big concepts, and rather than dumping it all here, I’ve written it up on two posts on my blog. The first post covers the why’s of using MicroID to create a system of social trust, and the second post covers the hows for content providers.

So what does all this mean? Well, we’ve been hit by a bolt of lightning on this idea. As MicroID is a standard, we’ve officially contacted both Flickr and del.icio.us to see if they would implement MicroID automatically for your pages - meaning you could claim your sites in these pages, but it means a whole lot more. It means leverage - leverage to get other big names to start adopting MicroID - so you can make verifiable claims of ownership on your content, so you can create webs of trust on the internet.

If you’d like to help us get started, head over to the Flickr ideas forum and add your “me too’s” to the MicroID idea. Now, we’ve contacted Flickr (both officially and back channel) and this ain’t gonna happen overnight - but if you show your support, it just might help Flickr realize the value of MicroID. To show our support for MicroID, we’ve released a standard perl implementation of a MicroID verifier under the GPL. We believe in this technology, and we’re willing to help get people start using this important standard. You can download a tarball or zip file.

So this is a big concept - a little MicroID could change the nature of trust on the web. And I’m sure I didn’t explain it so well (hopefully I’ll draw up some diagrams pretty soon, but my Photoshop skills are…well, you’ve seen em). However, if this notion has caught your interest, you’ll probably want to review my posts, the MicroID FAQ, and the MicroID home page. We’re on to something big here - please consider joining us.

It sort of took us too long to get our act together regarding this, but we’ve finally added some ClaimID mailing lists. These lists will be an unmoderated place where ClaimID users can meet and discuss, find solutions to problems, request (gulp) features ;), etc.

Right now we have two mailing lists. The first is claimID-users, which is the general purpose mailing list. This is the list everyone should be on. You’ll find out about new features, requests for testing, that sort of stuff.

The second list is claimID-developers, which is a list for people building applications that use the claimID API. If you’re on this list, be sure you’re also on claimID users. We expect claimID-developers to be a low-traffic list for the time being.

In other news, the big weekend maintenance went well - there’s more work for us to do, but we’re getting it done. We hope to be making some fairly big announcements in the next week or two. We’re in Boston in a few hours for the identity mash-up. See you there!

From time to time, ClaimID needs its ego stroked.

We’ll be going down for maintenance Saturday, June 17 from 9pm to 3am EDT.  Look how excited Mr. ClaimID looks.  I am a photoshop ninja.

Anyway, this downtime means big things for ClaimID.  Watch this space for more details!

Last night, we presented our ClaimID poster at JCDL - the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. The reception was great - we fielded a lot of interesting questions and met lots of neat people. “A poster?” you say…so at conferences, lots of times they will have poster sessions where you stand next to a poster and talk with people about your projects. Luckily, we were stationed right next to the bar

So, if you’d like to check out our poster, you can download it here. We tried to keep it simple - just a way to show what ClaimID is in a glance.

In other news, if you’d like a different look at ClaimID, we were delighted to see we were included in the latest Command N episode. Thanks to Amber Mac for thinking of us - again!

In watching Brian Ellin’s blog, I learn today that on June 1 there was intention made by Brion Vibber during his Google TechTalk (at minute 52) that Wikipedia is planning to support OpenID for their login process. Very exciting.

We’re hoping to join the fun within the week… watch this space.

Terrell and I will be heading up to Boston next week to attend the Identity Mashup conference.  If you’re local, or you’re attending the conference, drop us a line and we can meet up.  The conference, which will be held at Harvard, looks very interesting - and the good news is that registration is still available.  Hopefully we’ll see you there.

You’ve probably seen references to Microformats on ClaimID.  That hCard thing, and MicroID - they’re Microformats.  We try to explain what Microformats are, but Pete Prodoehl of Rasterweb does a better job.  Check out his slideshow here.  Nice work Pete.