Manage your online identity.

Last week we rolled out contacts here at claimID. We acted on the reality that part of our identity is defined by who we each know and who vouches for us.

We also decided that to play by the open standards we’re talking about so much here, we would implement on top of OpenID. So our entire contacts structure is built with OpenID as authentication – this makes your contacts more portable (and discoverable) from site to site – once other sites come online with the same philosophy.

One thing we launched without last week was the ability to invite those not already part of claimID to be a contact. We had the other two scenarios covered:

• contact request from claimID user -> to claimID user
• contact request from external OpenID user -> to claimID user

Today, we’re adding the ability to send a contact request to those outside of claimID.

• contact request from claimID user -> to email address

If they can authenticate with an OpenID, they become your contact. If they also sign up for a claimID account with that OpenID (or add it to an existing claimID account), your connection with them will become part of their new account.

You should see a link to ‘Add external contacts’ on both the contacts management page within your account as well as your own public-facing contacts page.

As always, let us know if you find anything to improve.

Now that we’ve added our new contact feature, here’s a short visual stepthrough of the process. To add a contact, first you browse to the page of some random ClaimID co-founder. Up in the top right, you’ll see a little link inviting you to add this person as a contact.

If you’re logged in and you click this link, you’ll be transported to a page confirming you want to add this person as a contact. If you’re not logged in, you’ll be transported to the same page, the only difference being the following page will ask you for your OpenID. Here’s what it looks like.

As you can see, this page asks you for your OpenID and XFN data. Once you successfully authenticate your OpenID, a message will be dispatched to the person informing them of your contact request. Once they approve the request, they’ll be sent to their contacts management page.

Finally, the contacts will show up on people’s ClaimID page under the “contacts” link, with XFN data. It will look like this.

We’ve tried to keep it clean and simple, but please let us know if you see anything weird or have any burning suggestions. We’re really excited about what we’ll be able to build on top of this open network in the future.

We’re the first ones to admit it, when we designed ClaimID, we expressly stayed away from making it a social networking product. Why? It didn’t make sense – ClaimID is about you. But over time, we realized that just like your links and OpenIDs make up your online identity, so do your friends and contacts. Identity is social, and there’s really no way to avoid that. So this morning, we’re introducing a very lightweight feature that enables you to add contacts in ClaimID.

Of course, you know the classic “contact” problem of any social software. Pretty much, you can only add friends or contacts of people already in the service. And since ClaimID isn’t quite Myspace yet (and we all agree that’s a good thing), what good is your social identity when you can only add a small percentage of your friends as contacts?

So we thought long and hard about this, and we realized that OpenID provided us a solution. As a result, we’ve made our new contacts feature OpenID-based. This means that you can add contacts directly in the service, or you can add OpenID contacts. If your boss doesn’t have a ClaimID, but her blog is an OpenID, she can still be your contact in ClaimID. Why hasn’t the internet been like this all along?

Contacts are about reputation. If we had limited contacts to within our system, you’d be short changed by the limited amount of people you can add. With more and more services producing OpenIDs (AOL, WordPress.com, etc), it just makes sense to build this contact system on top of OpenID. Making contact networks, or social networks, or whatever you want to call them OpenID-based is the future, and we hope that others will join us in embracing this use.

I’ll be following this post with a post that explains the contact system a little bit more in depth. I just wanted to share our reasoning for why we’ve added this feature, and why we decided to make it OpenID-based. We hope you enjoy!

ClaimID has been spotted all over the globe recently. First, we were in story in one of our great local newspapers – The Independent. We’re really excited about this piece, as the Independent is one of our favorite newspapers.

Then we travel down to Australia for a bit, where we have been mentioned in two stories. The first is an identity management piece in The Age entitled Up Close and Personal in a Voyeurs Paradise, and the second is a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled Your Life in the Public Domain.

On another note, Terrell and I will both be at SXSW, handing out our very cool buttons.   Here, model Alex poses with a ClaimID button while mastering Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.  We hope to see you there!