ClaimID Adds Link Verification
June 4th, 2006 - Fred StutzmanA great number of people have asked us for verification, and we’ve listened. I’m proud to announce that ClaimID now offers verification of your ClaimID links. Here’s a peek at my ClaimID page, with verification (purple highlight mine):
If you look next to the link, you’ll see “Verified.” This means that ClaimID has verified that I’m the owner of the pages I’ve claimed (We’ll probably come up with a verified logo at some point…or is text elegant enough?).
The verification process is very simple. We provide you with a MicroID that you embed in your claimed page. We then go out and check to see if the MicroID is there, and the rest is history. MicroID, developed earlier this year by Jeremie Miller, is a simple identity microformat. We think MicroID is perfect for this purpose - if you want to learn more, visit the MicroID website or blog.
To get started verifying your links, just log in to your ClaimID account and hover over your links - you’ll see a link called Verify. Once you click Verify, you’ll get a code snippet to embed in your page. After you embed the snippet, you just click a link and we go and check the MicroID. Like everything with ClaimID, we’ve kept this absolutely simple. (This process is also thoroughly documented in our help section)
A word about claiming things. Obviously, most of us won’t be able to claim everything on our ClaimID. We can’t edit pages that we don’t own - at least legally :). So don’t sweat that you can’t verify everything. Verify the stuff you can, or want to. Link verification is a big first step toward making ClaimID a verified place. We’ve got big things in the works with identity verification, too. People have asked, and we’ve listened. Let us know what you think!
June 6th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Great
Just a question about the MicroID: Is the communication ID the account’s email address or the URL of the user’s ClaimID account?
June 6th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
The communication ID is the account’s email address. We’re working on a solution to let you set the communication ID on a link-by-link basis…right now it is tied to your single ClaimID email. Hope that explains.
June 6th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
[...] I’ve been hard at work the last couple weeks getting claimID ready for her transition to being both an OpenID server and consumer. We will be able to add a layer of user-centered verification and aggregation above and beyond our recent announcement of link verification. [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 11:16 am
@Fred, yes thank you
Ah right, I totally forgot that you can’t change the email address anyway 
June 15th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
I’d like to suggest that ClaimID preemptively remove trailing slashes before calculating MicroIDs. The spec implies they should never be in place for the hash, and yet most of us prefer our bookmarks include them (not to mention in most browsers the bookmarklet will always result in a trailing slash on root-level URLs).
This caused me quite a bit of confusion trying to verify my site, which uses Richard K Miller’s elegant MicroID Wordpress plugin.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:54 am
how could i verify my del.icio.us or flickr.
i know opinity using api .
June 17th, 2006 at 4:52 am
Good question Zheng. I will have to look at the del. and flickr api specs.
June 23rd, 2006 at 12:54 am
[...] 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. [...]