Manage your online identity.

In the past few months, we’ve been spending a lot of our time and energy on OpenID. While we love OpenID and think it is the future, most of you didn’t join ClaimID just because we provided OpenID. Our goal at ClaimID is to address the full picture of online identity, and we believe that your online identity starts with the links that are about you.

In the next few months, we’ll be walking through some of our pre-exsisting features, with a goal of letting more people know about them, and to provide a more robust documentation set for the features (killing two birds with one stone – brilliant!).

Today, we’re going to walk through “Link Status Checking.” The idea behind this feature is really simple – if there are links out there about you, you want to know when they change or go offline. For example – let’s say you’re pointing to a newspaper article, and that newspaper article disappears into the archives. You’d want to know about that and update your profile accordingly. Just as it is important to create a profile, it is important to know that your profile is up to date and valid. So we’ll do that work for you

How to enable link status checking:

To enable link status checking, edit your account settings, and enable the “Alert me if my claimed links go offline” option.

What it does:

Every day, our link status checking robot will go out and make sure all of your links are there. If they don’t show up for a period of time, we’ll send you an email that lets you know the link has gone offline. You can then take the appropriate action.

Example:

So here is an example of a link I pointed to where the hyperlink changed:

I had pointed to the Lyceum staff webpage, but that was moved. So ClaimID emailed me, let me know. I updated the link to point to the right location, silenced the alert, and my profile was back, as good as new. Of course I’m biased, but I think this is pretty cool. If employers are Googling you, you want to know what is out there about you, and what has gone offline.

Hope some of you give this feature a try. We’ll be highlighting more of these features in the upcoming weeks.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Dispatches from a beta, Tips and Tricks, Walkthroughs, claimID.