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.

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!

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.