Manage your online identity.

Fun little stats report from the new ClaimID link status checker!

• We checked 3% of all links in the ClaimID DB
• Of those links, 34 were found to be offline/erroring/etc. That’s 4.5% of the checked set.
• Of those 34, 11 were found to be false-positive after the fact, lowering the percentage of offline links to 3% of the checked set. The margin of error on the entire set (all claimID links) was +/- 3.5, so we’ll have to get a bigger sample to further generalize.
• Of the false positives, the majority were from two sites (Amazon and IMDB) that simply don’t like the way our status checking monkey operates.

Honestly, I’m pretty pleased with these results. The status checker was tested on a fairly robust training set, but I was still worried about what was going to happen when we rolled live. We made a bunch of behind-the-scenes tweaks as over the past few days, and to have an overall false-positive rate of 1.5 really isn’t that bad. If we factor in the two sites that don’t like us (we can account for them in code), our false positive rate is way under 1 percent. Not bad at all.

Anyway, we’re going to be working to make this functionality continuously smarter over the next few days and weeks. We’re also going to roll in some new feature requests and tweaks that have come from our user feedback lists, and one especially awesome request from Lyceum Architect John Joseph Bachir.

If nothing else, we hope that ClaimID has helped you think about the identity you “create” online.  It is important to think about this, as online identity is new - we haven’t got everything worked out yet.  The records we leave behind are not only of our production (Blogs, emails) but also the side effects of our consumption (Last.fm playlists, del.icio.us bookmarks).  Never before has so much of our consumption and production been so public.  In a very interesting set of posts, Tara Hunt and Nicole Simon explore the concept of subscribing to a person.

Hunt says:

I have littered pieces of myself all over the web, in varying identities, avatars, pseudonyms, passwords and logins. I don’t want to start getting into the identity stuff, ’cause I could give a damn about single sign on. Seriously, sometimes I just want to dabble. I also have various degrees of interest where I have littered my being. And I most certainly don’t want to commit to one place for all of my ’stuff’ - I like variety. So, let’s not go there.

What I wouldn’t mind, though, is the ability to watch all of it. Watch who watches me. Watch someone else and who watches them. I want to subscribe to a person, as much or as little as interests me.

Simon responds by exploring systems of how we subscribe to people - and what it means when we do subscribe to someone.

And just because I read your blog and listen to your podcast does not automatically mean that I qualify as a contact / buddy. But my request may have been nicely written and so you want not to just say no - and let it lay there for some while. And probably forget about it.

It may be hard for us to grasp that we are micro-celebrities to our peers.  We may find it hard to believe that our del.icio.us links or last.fm playlists could interest our friends - or complete strangers.  The fact is, however, that they do.  We are infinitely interesting to each other - what we share online gives people a different, unique perspective into our identity. We struggle with the fact that complete strangers can use this information just as our friends would, but this is the challenge of coming to terms with online identity.

Internet identity verification is a real challenge. The challenge is in the conceptual nature of identity - what is identity, and where does it begin and end? In the identity lexicon, we think of identity as the summation of claims - I claim to be Fred, who claims to be from New York, and so on and so forth. However, in the absence of verification, what do all these claims mean? Is my Myspace or Facebook profile valid even though it hasn’t been verified? Are these profiles valid to all, or to some, or to just a few who know me personally?

In designing claimID, we banged our heads against these endless questions, initially declaring the problem too difficult to solve. As it happens, the problem of verification is still too difficult to solve, but a number of folks (including ClaimID) are making strong inroads toward workable solutions. In todays’s WSJ (pointers from everyone in the Identity community), an interesting article explores verified identity. A number of people we admire, including the folks from Trufina and Opinity are interviewed, and it is an interesting read.

When ClaimID was getting started, we hadn’t quite thought through how an identity ecosystem worked. Identity is big, conceptual, messy - it doesn’t fit neatly in anyone’s box. We knew that was the case and we made peace that ClaimID would solve the problems of the particular set of folks that needed a service like ClaimID. However, as we’ve progressed, we’ve seen that people’s identity needs are variable, multiplex - messy. An open system like MicroID, implemented properly, would allow me to verifiably connect all of my identity needs together - all my claims, all my identity services, and so on. This open meta-layer would let me connect all of my identity, making each service I use stronger.

The simple fact is identity is bigger than our claims, our verifications. As humans, our identity is all that represents us. Our identity is as much the stuff in our wallets as it is the people we sit with at lunch. In certain contexts, either one of these identity representations is more valuable than the other. Computational identity, the stuff we work on most of the time, is vastly more concerned with the identity in your wallet. However, in the age of social computing, in the age of Myspace and Facebook, in the age where an enormous portion of the market is going to have a social internet identity, shouldn’t we be working on solutions for this market? Indeed, this is ClaimID’s goal, and we feel like we have a very valid place in the identity ecosystem.

The claimID founders will be attending BarCampRDU (@RedHat HQ, Raleigh, NC) this weekend. If you’re going to attend, drop us a line or come say hi. We always love meeting people who use claimID and getting feedback. As an added bonus we’ll probably be giving away our neat little claimID buttons that everyone loves so much. We’re really looking forward to BarCampRDU - this event really looks like it is shaping up to be a lot of fun!

The guys at Ma.gnolia have just announced they’re including MicroIDs in their users’ pages. Users here at claimID should be able to verify their profile page at Ma.gnolia (http://ma.gnolia.com/people/USERNAME) if the email addresses used at both services (here and there) are the same.

ClaimID will soon be implementing the ability to have multiple email addresses in your claimID account that can be used to match against other services’ included MicroIDs. In case you give different email addresses to different online services (who does that? :P), this should allow you to claim them without any compromising your secretiveness.

Can you hear it coming? Decentralization is afoot!

And lots of ‘em. If you want to swap out the claimID logo on your blog or website, cruise over to http://claimid.com/media (also linked internally, of course) and grab one of our many, many new logos. I really dig the white chicklet…I might have to switch mine up

We’ve always been big fans of Microformats, particularly the hCard. Lots of you have told us you’re pleased that the hCard is a part of claimID - and we’ve always thought that’s cool. However, our implementation of hCard has always been a little, well, weak. In the past, your claimID hCard was just your name and URL - as of today, we’ve expanded this. If you’d like to expand your hCard to one that includes things like your company, address, phone number - just log in and edit your account settings.

As you can see, we’ve added a bunch of field that will automatically create a more robust hCard for you (including your picture, too). At the same time, we’ve also updated the hCard snippet so you can easily post this better hCard to your blog or website. We hope you enjoy!

Update: To compliment this improved hCard, we’ve added automatic pinging to the pingerati.net server. Pingerati is a neat service that enables Microformat search, and we’re happy to support it - while enabling you at the same time. Neat stuff.

Update 2: After some gentle prodding from Sebastian Küpers, we’ve added country to the hCard. Missed that one

Update 3: More fun with Microformats. All claimID pages are now marked up with the xFolk microformat.

Yesterday, I was very pleased and surprised to find that Christophe Ducamp had translated the ClaimID documentation to French!  It has long been our goal to provide documentation to users in other languages, and to see a community member step forward and translate for us - wow.  Christophe is a researcher and Microformats evangelist from Paris, and he’s also provided translation of the MicroID specification.  Thank you to Christophe!

When we started claimID, we were newbies to the field of digital identity. We learned that identity - for being a relatively intuitive concept - is anything but simple in the context of digital information. Digitally, your identity is not only the picture you create of yourself, but it is the picture others create of you. What’s more, your identity is also your access key to commerce, social applications, government information.

Andy Oram has written a fantastic article in which he explores the many areas of identity - what they are, how they interact, and why you should care. Written from his experiences at the identity mashup conference (which ClaimID attended), Andy presents an interesting, multiplex view on this increasingly vital conversation about identity. You’ve taken a very important step toward managing your online identity by caring about claimID, I hope you’ll enjoy this article.

You can now log in to LiveJournal, TypeKey and Zooomr with your ClaimID URL? That’s right! If you’d like to leave comments on someone’s LiveJournal with your ClaimID, just log in and use “http://claimid.com/yourusername” as the OpenID url. It’s the same with Zooomr, just log in with your ClaimID and you can create an account without creating a password.

Whoa. That’s cool. Our first step towards verification was the addition of MicroID, so you can verify your pages to your ClaimID. With the second step of OpenID, you can now use your ClaimID to log in places around the net, and you can verify other OpenID’s to your account. You can really start to build that trusted web of identity.

We’ve always said that ClaimID wasn’t going to be a typical veified service. We didn’t want your social security number or your fingerprint. We knew there was a better way. With MicroID and OpenID, ClaimID users can create real, verified identites without having to mess with the kind of info that thieves like to steal. The best part is, we’re just getting started. This is getting kinda fun, isn’t it?