Manage your online identity.

A little quick note of congrats to a company that inspires us - JanRain.  JanRain has been named to Business 2.0’s Top 25 startups to watch.  There’s a nice picture of Kveton up there too.  Congrats guys!

I noticed the following thread over at Jyte yesterday:

Now there’s a claim I  agree with.  Sure enough, right after agreeing with it, we recieved a note from Jyte’s Brian Ellin, telling us he’d rolled MicroID into Jyte.  A couple of tweaks on our end, a little coding, and just like that we’re now automatically verifying ownership of Jyte profile pages.

This little bit of coding work also gave us an excuse to update our verifier to the MicroID 0.3 spec, and now allows us the ability to verify MicroID’s based on OpenID’s or inames as well.  That’s probably sounds like technobabble, but it is significant work towards letting you automatically and verifiably create a trusted profile - one that makes all your web presences stronger and more trustworthy.  It is easy, organic reputation, and we think there’s a lot of value there.

Anyway, thanks to Brian at Jyte for this awesome quick turnaround.  And if you look at your ClaimID profile, you’ll probably notice your Jyte profile is now verified :).

ClaimID allows real people to aggregate what is online about themselves. It allows them to bring links together, sort them, talk about them, and generally refocus their online identity on their own terms. We’ve had great success so far in getting that message out - and the feedback we’ve received has been positive. People really like the empowerment and are pleased when their claimID page begins to appear in the search results for their name.

But we also want to convey that these links are validated - verified in some way. So we introduced MicroID and OpenID to our system. Since that time, people have been pointing to their own websites, their own blogs, and their own OpenIDs hosted at other Identity Providers (AOL, Verisign, JanRain, Livejournal, etc.). And with all of those identities, it made sense for us to create a trusted place for you to aggregate them.

Verified Page

Today, we launched a special page for each person that brings these verified links into greater focus. The verified information about a person is presented all on one page, in one place - and you can be sure that these links are maintained by the person who owns the claimID account because of the math behind the scenes. MicroID and OpenID are based on strong hashing algorithms and cryptography and have been designed to validate and verify claims - just the sort of thing we’re doing at claimID.

Our pages are at:
- http://claimid.com/terrell/verified
- http://claimid.com/fred/verified

They’re very clean and very powerful.

Once you find someone’s claimID Verified Page, you can be pretty sure that who you’re reading about at claimID is the same person at all those other sites. This allows us to really begin to tap into the power of distributed identity and maybe even hint at some uses for basic reputation across disparate websites.  Of course, if you don’t want to display your verified identity, you can easily turn this off in your account settings.

We’re not done with online reputation yet, but the single verified page at claimID is a very strong early step.

Some very exciting news from AOL - they have enabled all of their AOL accounts with OpenID.  That means that all AOL subscribers and AIM users - over 63 million at my count - now have working OpenIDs.  This is a huge, exciting move.

Oh yeah, if you want to test your AOL OpenIDs, you can leave a comment on the blog - we recently enabled OpenID commenting.  (Yeah, yeah, we know we were late to the party on that.)

I know lots of folks who follow this blog are interested in personal identity management.  I wanted to point you to a new collaboration between the JanRain folks and GNR, the Global Name Registry.  The new site, FreeYourID.com will allow you to have a .name domain with the backend powered by OpenID.  The site is free for 90 days if you’d like to give it a try!

Scott Kveton and Will Norris have written some good reviews of the site, and I love Scott’s thread as you can see debugging and troubleshooting going on in realtime.  Kudos to all involved!

One of the new features we dropped into ClaimID was an easy snippet of code that allows you to make your blog an OpenID (you could always do this before, we just auto-generate the code for you).

Just log in to ClaimID, browse to http://claimid.com/openid, and you’ll see a little section called “How do I delegate my OpenID.” It contains a little bit of code that you place inside the head of your blog or homepage.

Of course, if you need any help, just drop us an email or IM and we’ll help set you up.

At ClaimID, it has always been our goal to make identity on the web fun, simple and relatively painless for you. We’ve built a company around the values of trust, openness and real desire to help people. After watching the growth in the OpenID space in the past few months, we at ClaimID have made a decision to shift our emphasis. As of this morning, ClaimID is going to concentrate its business on being the web’s finest free OpenID identity provider.

So what does this mean? If you log in, you’ll see new documentation and features like easy code snippets to make your blog or website an OpenID, but in reality not a lot has changed. When we were building ClaimID, we created a tool that allowed you to simply and easily create a powerful web profile. As it happens, we feel this web profile (with things like MicroID verification) provide the perfect companion for an OpenID. Let’s face it - if your OpenID is going to represent your identity online, don’t you want to be able to create a robust profile that verifiably shows people who you are?

At ClaimID, our strength has always been translating the complex into the simple. We want to give you the best solutions, without requiring you to read a protocol or understand code. As web identity plays a greater role in all of our lives, we feel that we can really help people by enabling them with solutions simply. And as OpenID grows (and it will grow, says Bill Gates), we want to be there to help you take advantage of this amazing and useful tool.

We thank the tens of thousands of you who have signed up to ClaimID in our first few months in business, your support and encouragement has been amazing. As we embark on this slightly new direction, we welcome your feedback, ideas and criticism. Only through community support can we build an OpenID provider “for the rest of us”, and we look forward to working with all of you on this goal.