Manage your online identity.

Yesterday, I was a guest on the NPR program “Radio Times”, talking about social networking.  As you may know, studying social networking is how I got into identity - and ClaimID.  ClaimID was mentioned a few times on the program, so that was really pretty exciting.

If you’d like to listen to an audio recording of the program, you can find download links over on my blog.  It was an honor to be on such a respected program, and I hope you find it an interesting listen.

Interesting segment on NPR’s Morning Edition regarding how it is becoming commonplace for employers to Google employees and search for them in social networking sites. I found particularly interesting the idea that employers are using these methods to find out answers to questions they couldn’t ask in interviews (about religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc).

You can listen online here.

Fun little stats report from the new ClaimID link status checker!

• We checked 3% of all links in the ClaimID DB
• Of those links, 34 were found to be offline/erroring/etc. That’s 4.5% of the checked set.
• Of those 34, 11 were found to be false-positive after the fact, lowering the percentage of offline links to 3% of the checked set. The margin of error on the entire set (all claimID links) was +/- 3.5, so we’ll have to get a bigger sample to further generalize.
• Of the false positives, the majority were from two sites (Amazon and IMDB) that simply don’t like the way our status checking monkey operates.

Honestly, I’m pretty pleased with these results. The status checker was tested on a fairly robust training set, but I was still worried about what was going to happen when we rolled live. We made a bunch of behind-the-scenes tweaks as over the past few days, and to have an overall false-positive rate of 1.5 really isn’t that bad. If we factor in the two sites that don’t like us (we can account for them in code), our false positive rate is way under 1 percent. Not bad at all.

Anyway, we’re going to be working to make this functionality continuously smarter over the next few days and weeks. We’re also going to roll in some new feature requests and tweaks that have come from our user feedback lists, and one especially awesome request from Lyceum Architect John Joseph Bachir.

ClaimID has been developed with a very narrow focus - but a very wide vision.

We have built this tool to focus on the individual, to allow a single person to better allow others to find them and learn about them. We’ve given an individual the ability to do the heavy lifting of those who are searching for them. An individual can provide, in effect, their own search result set for their name.

In doing that, we also developed a list of best practices for monitoring your reputation and what others are saying about you.

This idea as been taken up by a collection of posts in the last couple days concerned with the same thing, but about a brand, or company reputation. What is the network saying about you? What is the network saying about your latest product?

This is no doubt an old concept. This is also no doubt an exciting time where we can have a very tight feedback cycle and directly influence the conversations happening around us. We can jump in and talk back.

Jeremiah Owyang has posted an amended list of Cameron Olthuis’s 10 things you should be monitoring. Then Joseph Jaffe amended that list and upped the ante to 23 things.

Olthuis’s original list is here:

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Public facing figures
4. Product names
5. Product URLs
6. The industry “hang outs”
7. Employee activity blogs
8. Conversations
9. Brand image
10. Competitors

Monitor these, and you won’t be caught unaware.

Additionally, Peter Kim, in the comments of Jaffe’s post, has drawn my attention to an upcoming Forrester Wave report on vendors who provide this very type of brand awareness and brand monitoring.

Sometimes when we release updates we secretly hope they are going to change the world.  Hmm, well this one probably isn’t going to change the world, but it is going to be very useful to you.  Starting this morning, claimID has added in link status checking.

For many of us, our claimID’s are made up of stuff that we link to but don’t control.  As the internet is well, the internet, sometimes this stuff goes offline.  As this stuff represents your identity, you want to know when it isn’t there - but you’re too busy to check it every day.  Here’s the solution - we’ll do it for you.

Basically, if you enable link status checking, we’ll send a little monkey out once a day to make sure all of the links in your claimID are online.  If our little monkey doesn’t find a link on your claimID for a few days, we’ll send you an email letting you know that one of your links has gone offline.  This way you will always know what is going on with the stuff that represents your identity online.  Indeed, this is very useful.

Couple of caveats with this, however.  We’re claiming a big, fat alpha on this service.  Accurately checking all of the types of stuff people claim in ClaimID is not a trivial task.  As we ramp this up, we know there are going to be false-positive cases we’re going to have to account for.  We won’t be able to accurately check everything - however, we will be able to accurately check a good proportion of links in ClaimID.

If you’d like to take advantage of Link Status Checking, all you need to do is log in to your account, and select the little radio button that says “Alert me if my claimed links go offline”.  Please work with us and send us bug reports on false positives (or false negatives) to bugs@claimid.com.

We hope that you find this service useful.  It is our goal to make it easy for you to manage your identity - and we hope that the link status checker saves you lots of time as you attempt to keep track of what is about you online.  We’ll be robustifying this in the future, and possibly even adding in some pay options for advanced checking.  Anyway, give it a shot, and let us know what you think!

If nothing else, we hope that ClaimID has helped you think about the identity you “create” online.  It is important to think about this, as online identity is new - we haven’t got everything worked out yet.  The records we leave behind are not only of our production (Blogs, emails) but also the side effects of our consumption (Last.fm playlists, del.icio.us bookmarks).  Never before has so much of our consumption and production been so public.  In a very interesting set of posts, Tara Hunt and Nicole Simon explore the concept of subscribing to a person.

Hunt says:

I have littered pieces of myself all over the web, in varying identities, avatars, pseudonyms, passwords and logins. I don’t want to start getting into the identity stuff, ’cause I could give a damn about single sign on. Seriously, sometimes I just want to dabble. I also have various degrees of interest where I have littered my being. And I most certainly don’t want to commit to one place for all of my ’stuff’ - I like variety. So, let’s not go there.

What I wouldn’t mind, though, is the ability to watch all of it. Watch who watches me. Watch someone else and who watches them. I want to subscribe to a person, as much or as little as interests me.

Simon responds by exploring systems of how we subscribe to people - and what it means when we do subscribe to someone.

And just because I read your blog and listen to your podcast does not automatically mean that I qualify as a contact / buddy. But my request may have been nicely written and so you want not to just say no - and let it lay there for some while. And probably forget about it.

It may be hard for us to grasp that we are micro-celebrities to our peers.  We may find it hard to believe that our del.icio.us links or last.fm playlists could interest our friends - or complete strangers.  The fact is, however, that they do.  We are infinitely interesting to each other - what we share online gives people a different, unique perspective into our identity. We struggle with the fact that complete strangers can use this information just as our friends would, but this is the challenge of coming to terms with online identity.

Internet identity verification is a real challenge. The challenge is in the conceptual nature of identity - what is identity, and where does it begin and end? In the identity lexicon, we think of identity as the summation of claims - I claim to be Fred, who claims to be from New York, and so on and so forth. However, in the absence of verification, what do all these claims mean? Is my Myspace or Facebook profile valid even though it hasn’t been verified? Are these profiles valid to all, or to some, or to just a few who know me personally?

In designing claimID, we banged our heads against these endless questions, initially declaring the problem too difficult to solve. As it happens, the problem of verification is still too difficult to solve, but a number of folks (including ClaimID) are making strong inroads toward workable solutions. In todays’s WSJ (pointers from everyone in the Identity community), an interesting article explores verified identity. A number of people we admire, including the folks from Trufina and Opinity are interviewed, and it is an interesting read.

When ClaimID was getting started, we hadn’t quite thought through how an identity ecosystem worked. Identity is big, conceptual, messy - it doesn’t fit neatly in anyone’s box. We knew that was the case and we made peace that ClaimID would solve the problems of the particular set of folks that needed a service like ClaimID. However, as we’ve progressed, we’ve seen that people’s identity needs are variable, multiplex - messy. An open system like MicroID, implemented properly, would allow me to verifiably connect all of my identity needs together - all my claims, all my identity services, and so on. This open meta-layer would let me connect all of my identity, making each service I use stronger.

The simple fact is identity is bigger than our claims, our verifications. As humans, our identity is all that represents us. Our identity is as much the stuff in our wallets as it is the people we sit with at lunch. In certain contexts, either one of these identity representations is more valuable than the other. Computational identity, the stuff we work on most of the time, is vastly more concerned with the identity in your wallet. However, in the age of social computing, in the age of Myspace and Facebook, in the age where an enormous portion of the market is going to have a social internet identity, shouldn’t we be working on solutions for this market? Indeed, this is ClaimID’s goal, and we feel like we have a very valid place in the identity ecosystem.