New Verified Page at claimID
February 19th, 2007 - Terrell RussellClaimID 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.
February 19th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
[...] belong to you. Also it is another piece of a puzzle for building online reputation. But I better quote the claimID folks themselves: This allows us to really begin to tap into the power of distributed identity and maybe even hint [...]
February 19th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
[...] rolled out Verified Pages [...]
February 20th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Crikey, it appears that the OpenIDs will now be published by doing this.
It is generally not advised to publicise these for security reasons, and I don’t want someone to google my anonymous OpenID to find out who I am. I have removed my OpenIDs for now and I strongly recommending not showing them publicly unless a user explicitly asks to have it shown.
February 21st, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Alistair, In case you didn’t notice, there is a new option under account settings, “Display my verified OpenID accounts:”
I do agree with Alistair, this option should probably default to disabled by default.
February 27th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Great stuff, option found a changed.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:03 am
Why does the /verified page load with JavaScript? It should be Google accessible too.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:36 pm
The search engines will definitely find that information – that said, we’re displaying mostly for human consumption, and the javascript seemed more elegant. Of course, we’re always willing to talk more about it.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:44 am
My main issue with it is that I have NoScript, and when I load the /verified page without enabling JS for claimid.com, it just looks like the regular page. I assume that other lightweight browsers such as Dillo and W3M, and other browsers with Javascript disabled, will see the same thing. The URL /verified seems to suggest that it will load a totally different set of information by default.
Although, I recognize that this is just nitpicking.