I’d alluded to this list in the last couple posts - but I’d like to unveil it here officially, now.

http://claimid.com/microid

On the heels of our announcement regarding multiple email address management and autoverification for MicroID-enabled sites, we have another announcement…

We have now retroactively verified all our users’ links that belong to sites in our list of Known MicroID Publishers.

After extensive local testing for at least 15-20 minutes, our extremely powerful regular expression engine ran through the entire claimID database and flagged all the links that matched the Publishers list.

So what this means for you, the user: without any extra work on your part, if your email addresses are the same here and at the other end of your claimed link, it’s now automatically verified for you. And it should be marked as such on your claimID page.

If you expected a certain link to verify and it did not - there are two things you need to check in order to convince us our well-tested code is doing something wrong:

1. The exact email address used to compute the MicroID on the other end - must be in your account here at claimID.
2. The URL in question must be exactly the same one they’re using on the other end. Trailing slashes matter. The http(s) matters. Exactly the same.

We’re working on a guide to help with working through issues of MicroID verification. Watch this space.

I’d like to take this opportunity to announce two new features here at claimID. We’ve been working hard to make sure this stuff is pretty easy to understand and to follow.

Tell us how we’re doing!

1) Multiple Email Addresses

At long last, you can now manage multiple email addresses from within your account. More importantly for some of you, you can get rid of that ’spam’ address you put in before you trusted us and get your MicroIDs verifying with real email addresses.

Any addresses you list in your account will remain completely hidden from outside viewers. At a later date, we hope to allow an option to display the addresses you want to display, but not yet. For now, they’re only visible to you from within the management interface in your account.

2) Auto MicroID Verification

When you add a new link (or edit an existing URL) and the site you add is a “Known MicroID Publisher”, your link will be automatically put into the queue for verification by our MicroID ninjas. This will remove the barrier of entry for a lot of you with regards to verification of the claims you’re making here at claimID. As the list of publishers grows, this will be a very nice feature indeed.

3) Three? Who said three?

One of the slick interactions between these two features is that now, with multiple email addresses in your account, the MicroID verifier can try and match against *all* your verified email addresses. If *any* of them match, you’re verified!

–

As we add new Known MicroID Publishers to the following list, we hope to retroactively verify your links as well - but that hasn’t happened quite yet.

Current List of Known MicroID Publishers

• last.fm
• del.icio.us
• ma.gnolia.com
• claimID.com
• wikitravel.org

Some good news from the OpenID world - blog search engine Technorati has adopted OpenID.  This means that if your blogging platform supports OpenID, you can use your login to claim your blog in Technorati.  Sure, this is a small step - but it is a small step that has consequence because of its scale.

The idea of using a decentralized identity system to make claims between services is very useful - and it is something we’ve been working on since very early in ClaimID’s development.  As more of our identity goes online, it makes sense that we are going to want to claim some of this identity.  To address this, we have OpenID and MicroID.

We’re very excited by this news.  We’re also really excited by the news that both del.icio.us and Last.fm are now supporting MicroID.  These forward-thinking services understand the value of claiming identity - and we’re very happy they have adopted open formats for making these claims.  So today, it is a kudos to Technorati, Last.fm and del.icio.us - thank you for joining us in this important work on identity.

Scott Allen wrote earlier today about his recent survey results for Rapleaf. The survey reports that consumers say ratings of the seller are the most important factor to determine their level of trust as they move through a purchasing decision.

“Credibility is key,” wrote one respondent, “and I think it’s difficult to establish in a classified ad. How can you develop trust in you, your product, your service, in just a few lines?”

Scott goes on to write:

Several respondents expressed a desire to have ratings be available across sites. In response to the question, “What one or two things do you feel could be done to best increase the trust between buyers and sellers,” replies included:

“I like eBay’s feedback concept, although I wish there was a centralized version of this, so I could see how their feedback looks from other places (craigslist sales, Barnes and Nobles used book sales, etc.) and so people could take their feedback scores with them.”

“Reputations systems are important, and being able to understand a person’s reputation across multiple sites would be a boon (in other words, to blend, say, MySpace ratings and eBay ratings).”

“Some sort of due diligence, much like eBay’s rating system. I think also that it would be good to have some sort of overall trusted vendor rating for use on the entire internet.”

claimID can help provide this type of service as well - indirectly. We don’t have tight integration with individual services, but if MicroID becomes more of a standard around the web, we stand a very good chance of becoming a clearinghouse where buyers and sellers can look to find additional risk-averting information.

Embed a link to your claimID in your auction profile.

Put it on your homepage. Link to it from your email.

Allow others to trust you a little more by seeing your online identity - the identity you’ve constructed from all across the Internet - the identity you manage.

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!