Manage your online identity.

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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 1:46 pm and is filed under New Features, Projects, Tips and Tricks, claimID.