New Feature: OpenID-based contacts
March 21st, 2007 - Fred StutzmanWe’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!
March 21st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
[...] claimID coverage « New Feature: OpenID-based contacts [...]
March 21st, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I can see how I can request that a claimID member become a contact, but I don’t see a way to add an external openID as a contact. Or is that part not implemented yet?
March 21st, 2007 at 3:17 pm
So that’s a valid (and difficult) question. Since the external OpenID doesn’t exist in our system, there’s not really any way we can message or inform that person of the contact request. I suppose we could do it in the LinkedIN style where you auto-generate an email to the person asking them making you to be a contact…though I’ve never really been a fan of that.
This is something we should think about, though I’m not exactly sure what the right answer is.
March 21st, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Yes, the biggest issue is that we cannot pre-verify that email address is owned by that OpenID (if we let you enter it – ala LinkedIn). Since contacts are based on OpenID – that’s what we’ve got to work with at the moment.
Sending contact messages ‘out’ from a system is going to present this same problem for others as other OpenID-based systems come online.
Perhaps we could allow users to send an email to any email address simply stating that ‘claimID user USERNAME is interested in making you a contact. Please visit http://claimID.com/USERNAME to initiate that process’. They would still have to present an OpenID to make that connection – but it would happen external->internal (already works) instead of internal->external (your question).
March 21st, 2007 at 4:36 pm
And then there’s the spam problem…but I suppose that would be pretty easy to deal with. But yeah, I can’t see any other solution than the linkedin solution…bah.
March 21st, 2007 at 5:05 pm
[...] Dass Identität ein Ergebnis sozialer Prozesse ist, ist klar und wird durch die steigende Relevanz sozialer Netzwerke heute deutlich: Identitätsmanagement wird zugleich anspruchsvoller und wichtiger und social networks (meinetwegen im Web2.0) helfen dabei. Die Identität gibt es nicht in der Realität, genauer: gibt es nicht unabhängig von einem Beobachter dieser Identität. Es gibt nur Darstellungen (”Erzählungen”) von Identitäten. Das heißt auch, dass Identität gestaltet werden muss, mit anderen Worten: uns, den Menschen, aufgegeben ist. “Identität” ist damit ein Gegenstand sozialethischer Reflexion. OpenID ist ein Rahmen für die digitale Identität (oder: a “free framework for user-centric digital identity”, ebd.). Aber auch eine digitale Identität kommt nicht ohne “Kontakt”, “Kommunikation” und “Interaktion” aus. ClaimID (schon vorher mehr als ein OpenID-Server) hat jetzt ein Feature eingebaut, mit dem man Kontakte über OpenIDs herstellen und pflegen kann. Zitat: 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… (Quelle) [...]
March 21st, 2007 at 7:23 pm
[...] fine folks at claimID have launched a new feature to their excellent service today: contacts. It sounds like as if it was nothing [...]
March 21st, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Maybe I misunderstood the post. It says:
“This means that you can add contacts directly in the service, or you can add OpenID contacts.”
So what did you mean by the second part?
I can see echoes of FOAF and existing usage of XFN, especially if people mutually link to each other. I like the fact that I can do those on my own domain and retain complete control. I can say that I know someone famous, but unless they do the same for me then the link is tenuous.
BTW I’m not sure how the OpenID log-in is working for comments. I have to enter a comment along with my Open ID before I can get logged in, but that does not post the comment.
March 21st, 2007 at 9:53 pm
The second part means that you can establish a contact relationship from your ClaimID to an OpenID. Right now our site is set up so that the person owning the OpenID must add you as a contact, but we’re rolling a feature in that will allow you invite people to be your OpenID contact. If I’m not being clear please lemme know.
Oh and yeah, the OpenID commenting is a little strange. If arent logged in I’ve seen it drop posts. I’ll look to see if we’re on the most recent version.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
[...] has announced new feature: contacts (see also Fred’s blog post). This makes ClaimID, originally an elegant [...]
March 22nd, 2007 at 4:26 am
[...] new feature, which is pretty slick, involves OpenID based contacts. Which 37 Signals new Highrise application, and the insane population of LinkedIn, managing [...]
March 22nd, 2007 at 8:20 am
Fred, reading the second post on contacts I think I understand now. Someone who is not using ClaimID can say they they know someone who is by logging in with their OpenID. The ClaimID user can then confirm the relationship.
That’s fair enough. I understand that you cannot verify things the other way around. A limitation of an OpenID is that it does not seem to provide a means to contact the owner unless they supply an email address when they log in. I guess if they did you could send them an email with a link to confirm the relationship.
Keep up the good work. I assume you have seen the Slashdot discussion around someone’s opinion on why the Semantic Web will fail. I still think it has a chance if we can prove it’s usefulness.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/21/0235208
March 22nd, 2007 at 2:01 pm
My open id page is http://www.techmag.biz/thejeshgn
And I haved added all my friends links there as XFN. Now I could build a thirdy party tool like rubhub to crawl and map.
Once you login into the third party app using your openid. It goes to your open id page and crawls for friends and gives me a wonderful network diagram. It could be one way or two way.
March 23rd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
[...] this month, ClaimID added an OpenID and XFN based contact system. It is a first step, and in its current implementation the value proposition is pretty thin. The [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:36 am
[...] social networking: Sites like videntity and claimID are now hooking together OpenID and microformats to help provide for the first distributed social [...]
April 5th, 2007 at 3:39 am
[...] Stutzman, posting about claimID’s decision to add a very lightweight feature that enables you to add contacts in ClaimID, pointed out that identity is social. That’s true, and it’s the reason my LinkedIn [...]
April 30th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Now, let´s plugg in this feature into peopleaggregator. http://www.peopleaggregator.net Then we will see more action in this sphere. The more the merrier.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
[...] we’ve long innovated in the open-identity space; our work with MicroID and our deployment of OpenID-based social networks stand in evidence. At the same time, we’ve always respected your identity rights, giving [...]