Manage your online identity.

Yesterday, Noah Kagan linked to a great startup advice list entitled 17 Pithy Insights for Startup Founders. It’s reminiscent of another great list by Blogger founder Evan Willians entitled Ten Rules for Web Startups. We found Williams’ list very early on in the ClaimID process and really took it to heart.

Lists like these commonly feature a core piece of advice with which I agree wholeheartedly. In the pithy list, it is “At the end of each day, ask yourself: “Did the product get better for customers today?”. If you don’t have a good answer, stay up until you do.” Put simply, a startup should make its product better each day. Of course, that doesn’t mean your work is always customer-facing - some days your work might only be blogging or responding to emails. However, the lifeblood of a startup is feeding it with new thought, bugfixes, features - stuff that should be done daily. You must constantly work to make your product better.

Today, we’ve made our product better. Michael Biven and a number of others in the ClaimID community wanted to make groups collapsible so browsing large ClaimID’s was easier. So this morning, we rolled it live, and now you can collapse groups in ClaimID. Indeed, that’s a small improvement. However, the thing about small improvements is that they add up to big improvements. And when the requests come from the community, you know you’re making things better for the people who matter the most.

ClaimID proudly announces it has joined a consortium of ten forward-thinking companies to fund the development and adoption of OpenID. ClaimID utilizes OpenID, a standards-based identity protocol; it lets you do cool stuff like log into LiveJournal or Wikipedia (very soon!) with your claimID URL. Not only is that cool, it just makes sense - OpenID is decentralized, scalable, easy-to-use and it saves you from having to create new accounts at every site you log into.

Announced by JanRain CEO Scott Kveton at OSCON, the consortium’s first project is an OpenID code bounty. The consortium will offer $5,000 to ten open source projects that successfully implement OpenID. I know what you’re thinking - “$5,000 to implement OpenID - sign me up!” Well, there are a few conditions. Your project must be OSI licensed, and there must be either 5,000 downloads a month or 200,000 users of publicly installed instances. Software like Wordpress, phpBB, Drupal or Joomla are great examples - and you can suggest others. Not only will each of these projects be getting $5,000, but they will also be investing in the future of identity, and making it easier for people to use their projects. It is a win-win all around.

The consortium is made up of forward-thinking companies that share a goal to make identity better on the net. They are Verisign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity, Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, NetMesh, Sxip and claimID. We’re looking to expand our consortium, so if you’re interested in supporting this important cause, please contact us. The coordinating site, located at http://iwantmyOpenID.com, and bounty program were organized by the OpenID community.

We’re so happy to be able to take part in this very important goal. We feel that OpenID is great way to give people the identity solutions they need. With this bounty program and consortium, we hope that people will take this opportunity to collaborate, converse and compromise. We’re convinced we’ve made a great decision in supporting OpenID, its community and this consortium, and we look forward to the important progress this initiative will make.

The claimID founders will be attending BarCampRDU (@RedHat HQ, Raleigh, NC) this weekend. If you’re going to attend, drop us a line or come say hi. We always love meeting people who use claimID and getting feedback. As an added bonus we’ll probably be giving away our neat little claimID buttons that everyone loves so much. We’re really looking forward to BarCampRDU - this event really looks like it is shaping up to be a lot of fun!

Scott Allen wrote earlier today about his recent survey results for Rapleaf. The survey reports that consumers say ratings of the seller are the most important factor to determine their level of trust as they move through a purchasing decision.

“Credibility is key,” wrote one respondent, “and I think it’s difficult to establish in a classified ad. How can you develop trust in you, your product, your service, in just a few lines?”

Scott goes on to write:

Several respondents expressed a desire to have ratings be available across sites. In response to the question, “What one or two things do you feel could be done to best increase the trust between buyers and sellers,” replies included:

“I like eBay’s feedback concept, although I wish there was a centralized version of this, so I could see how their feedback looks from other places (craigslist sales, Barnes and Nobles used book sales, etc.) and so people could take their feedback scores with them.”

“Reputations systems are important, and being able to understand a person’s reputation across multiple sites would be a boon (in other words, to blend, say, MySpace ratings and eBay ratings).”

“Some sort of due diligence, much like eBay’s rating system. I think also that it would be good to have some sort of overall trusted vendor rating for use on the entire internet.”

claimID can help provide this type of service as well - indirectly. We don’t have tight integration with individual services, but if MicroID becomes more of a standard around the web, we stand a very good chance of becoming a clearinghouse where buyers and sellers can look to find additional risk-averting information.

Embed a link to your claimID in your auction profile.

Put it on your homepage. Link to it from your email.

Allow others to trust you a little more by seeing your online identity - the identity you’ve constructed from all across the Internet - the identity you manage.

The guys at Ma.gnolia have just announced they’re including MicroIDs in their users’ pages. Users here at claimID should be able to verify their profile page at Ma.gnolia (http://ma.gnolia.com/people/USERNAME) if the email addresses used at both services (here and there) are the same.

ClaimID will soon be implementing the ability to have multiple email addresses in your claimID account that can be used to match against other services’ included MicroIDs. In case you give different email addresses to different online services (who does that? :P), this should allow you to claim them without any compromising your secretiveness.

Can you hear it coming? Decentralization is afoot!

And lots of ‘em. If you want to swap out the claimID logo on your blog or website, cruise over to http://claimid.com/media (also linked internally, of course) and grab one of our many, many new logos. I really dig the white chicklet…I might have to switch mine up

We’ve always been big fans of Microformats, particularly the hCard. Lots of you have told us you’re pleased that the hCard is a part of claimID - and we’ve always thought that’s cool. However, our implementation of hCard has always been a little, well, weak. In the past, your claimID hCard was just your name and URL - as of today, we’ve expanded this. If you’d like to expand your hCard to one that includes things like your company, address, phone number - just log in and edit your account settings.

As you can see, we’ve added a bunch of field that will automatically create a more robust hCard for you (including your picture, too). At the same time, we’ve also updated the hCard snippet so you can easily post this better hCard to your blog or website. We hope you enjoy!

Update: To compliment this improved hCard, we’ve added automatic pinging to the pingerati.net server. Pingerati is a neat service that enables Microformat search, and we’re happy to support it - while enabling you at the same time. Neat stuff.

Update 2: After some gentle prodding from Sebastian Küpers, we’ve added country to the hCard. Missed that one

Update 3: More fun with Microformats. All claimID pages are now marked up with the xFolk microformat.

Yesterday, I was very pleased and surprised to find that Christophe Ducamp had translated the ClaimID documentation to French!  It has long been our goal to provide documentation to users in other languages, and to see a community member step forward and translate for us - wow.  Christophe is a researcher and Microformats evangelist from Paris, and he’s also provided translation of the MicroID specification.  Thank you to Christophe!