We’ve added weewar.com to our list of autoverified domains (aka Known MicroID Publishers) and hope to continue seeing that list grow!

For completeness… Alex’s Weewar profile

This morning, Digg announced publication of MicroIDs on every user profile:

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

Again, just like last week, please check the list of Known MicroID Publishers and make sure your links are in the right format. Those trailing slashes are tricky sometimes.

Today we add Plaxo to the list of Known MicroID Publishers. Welcome, Plaxo! And thanks Joseph!

You can see it in action in the head of any page with the pattern http://NICKNAME.myplaxo.com/.

Plaxo will create and publish a MicroID for each of your verified email addresses in your account. You need to visit your settings page and claim your NICKNAME.

When you come back to your claimID account and claim your Plaxo profile page, it will be put in the verification queue automatically. Please note that since MicroIDs work with math done on URLs and identifiers, the URLs must be exactly correct. Please make sure that your myplaxo.com URL has a trailing slash when you enter it at claimID. (This also goes for the links pointing to Last.fm).

Another small step to taking over the world. We should congratulate ourselves.

Now – we’ve invoked some of the latent power in this XFN and have auto-added rel=”me” to any link that is verified in our system (via MicroID). As new verified claims are added to your accounts, they will also be marked with rel=”me” and be compatible with the recent discussions around the Open Social Web and microformats.

XFN and rel=”me”

Identity consolidation is something we’re only beginning to tap into. As the web becomes more programmable and mashable, XFN, along with other microformats and small building blocks like MicroID, begin to show their potential.

Here is a short section from the XFN pages at GMPG:

Identity
Me is used to indicate that the link points to a site for which you are responsible. This is useful when pointing to various profiles on social-networking sites, for example, or when pointing between two different blogs run by the same person. Note that use of this value is exclusive of all other XFN values; thus, you cannot declare rel="me co-resident" even though it is to be hoped that you are in fact co-resident with yourself.

This addition is only a small thing, in the grand scheme, but another solid piece of our commitment to education and advocacy with regard to online identity.

An example of how this is powerful

Plaxo’s open source Open Social Graph (e.g. Online Identity Consolidator). It spiders out from a source URL based on the XFN it finds. Then it builds the graph and reports back. Click on a few of the links below to see it in action – with the source URLs being our newly automated rel=”me” pages at claimID:

• habib – text, json, xml
• terrell – text, json, xml
• jsmarr – text, json, xml

More Discussion

Further reading around the idea of an open portable social network:

• http://blog.claimid.com/2007/09/claimid-supports-the-open-social-web/
• http://www.plaxo.com/info/opensocialgraph
• http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
• http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/09/were_opening_th.html
• http://opensocialweb.org/

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Not only are we proud to support this bill of rights, but I’m happy to report that we’re also in compliance with it.  At ClaimID, 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 our users control to do what they’d like with their data.  We’ve always known that being open and forthwith is the right approach, and we’re certainly pleased to see these values gaining so much traction.

Wink.com describes themselves as ‘the people search engine’.

Wink allows you to verify other site information via MicroID, as well as entering your actual login/password credentials for sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. If you trust Wink.com with your credentials, these both serve the same function.

Remember that finding someone and verifying who they are should be an organic human process and you should probably depend on more than one source (like any research you do). MicroID allows this kind of triangulation, and does it in the clear. Please continue to encourage the other sites you use to publish MicroIDs so you can build your own reputations online – so you can take the good things you do and say on one site with you to other sites.

In unrelated news, IIW2007 was a great success and Fred and I met a few new faces and reconnected with some older ones. The identity space is still picking up speed and with a flurry of new projects showing successful interoperability with Higgins and CardSpace and OSIS, the energy is really starting to compound. We’re proud to be a part of what is happening.

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 .

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.

ClaimID (http://www.claimid.com) is a free online identity management service. ClaimID allows claimants to aggregate and annotate online information that is about them or created by them. ClaimID “gives people rather than a search engine, control over their identity.” (http://www.claimid.com/faq)  In addition to ClaimID’s online resume function, the site’s loose structure encourages claimants to create descriptive categories (e.g. blogs, networks, links, photo-sharing) to which they can add content. A ClaimID resume is a dynamic document. Claimants often include links to flickr on their ClaimID page.

We love it!  In other news, Peter St. Andre has been hard at work completing versions .01 and .02 of the MicroID spec.  This is extremely valuable to the MicroID movement.  If you’re interested in contributing to the ongoing efforts with MicroID, please consider joining the MicroID mailing list.

In other news, happy 2007 to everyone!  We’ve got some great stuff planned in 2007, first and foremost of which is this recently-completed hardware migration that has ClaimID running all sorts of snappy.   Best to everyone – thank you for joining us in claiming your identity.

• Simon Willison – How to turn your blog into an OpenID.  A great post about how to make your blog an openID.  Of course you can use your claimID URL as your OpenID in this fantastic howto.
• Six Apart Weblog – OpenID’s Growing Momentum.  The folks at Six Apart have been using OpenID for a long time – these forward thinkers speculate on some of OpenID’s momentum going forward.
• O’Reilly Radar – OpenID on the Upswing.  O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest checks in on OpenID and shows Google Trends data.

These are great links, with lots of resources.  Here are some other cool links we’ve come across:

• ClaimID Weblog – OpenID Resources.  Ahem Just a good collection of links to everything OpenID.
• Adam Fortuna – MicroID, the coolest technology from 2006 you’ve never heard of.  Not OpenID, but MicroID is very dear to our heart – Adam contributes code and explains MicroID.

OpenID is an organic phenomenon, but all of this great coverage wouldn’t happen without the hard work of professional instigators like Scott Kveton and Chris Messina.  And the phenomenon wouldn’t be anywhere near it is today without the hard work of coders like Brian Ellin who have contributed so much open source OpenID code.

2007 looks like an exciting year for OpenID and ClaimID.  This identity stuff is really starting to catch on.  We knew that it would take a little time, that we’d have to be slow and a little methodological, but the reality is people need identity solutions.  In the next year, we’re going to work hard to deliver those solutions to you, all the while keeping ClaimID a simple, trustworthy and useful place.