Manage your online identity.

A few days ago, we rolled out ID Selector at ClaimID. Designed by the wonderful folks at JanRain, ID Selector is a nifty technology that makes the OpenID sign-in process significantly easier. Here’s what it looks like:

The ID Selector makes it easy to recall your OpenID when you’re logging into a site, solving a plethora of problems that occur when OpenID’s proliferate.  We know this will make it easier for you to log in to OpenID, and we also hope that this will drive some more of that sweet OpenID-consuming that is required to push this movement forward.

If you’d like an ID Selector from your website, simply sign up with IDSelector.com.  Great work to Brian and Co. at JanRain!

The past year has been an exciting one for OpenID. Millions of OpenID’s have been created, thousands of sites support OpenID, and a growing ecosystem of fans, developers and advocates are proving that an open approach to identity makes sense. As the network of value around OpenID grows, our OpenID providers need to be trustworthy and secure. ClaimID has long been one of the most trusted OpenID providers on the net; while we offer banking-quality security, we felt it was time to take our product to the next level.

To do so, ClaimID will integrate Confident Technologies RecognitionAUTH system. The RecognitionAUTH system offers users an innovative and highly secure second factor in authentication. This enhancement will solve many of the criticisms of the OpenID security model, providing you with an account you can use with confidence going forward.

We’re excited to be working the the Confident/Vidoop team on this integration, particularly our friend and advocate Scott Kveton. In enhancing security, we hope ClaimID users will feel more comfortable, and more secure as they choose us as their identity provider. We hope to deploy RecognitionAUTH soon - so watch this space for more details.

Here at claimID, we’re constantly trying to find ways to add small bits of technology and standards to our existing code. We’ve had XFN built into our links from the beginning, but that functionality has been hidden behind our “advanced” tab whenever you’re creating or editing a link for your claimID page.

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/

Our users have asked for this for a while - and we’re glad to finally see it out of development.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve got SSL enabled now at claimID.com. You should be able to login to your existing account at https://claimID.com. Those of you reading who don’t already have an account can register with the knowledge that there’s nobody in the middle watching your password. Additionally, the change_password page is encrypted as well.

We’ve chosen to only enable a few points of the site - where your password is used. The rest of the site (and your OpenID URLs, most importantly) have not changed. This is important because your OpenID is your login to other sites - and a change from http to https would effectively change who you are at those other sites. But fear not - you’re still you.

Thanks to everyone who asked for this. It’s been a long time coming.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve built a ClaimID application for Facebook. This simple application will display your verified ClaimID account (verified with OpenID) on your Facebook profile, allowing people who visit your profile to have a trusted link to your ClaimID page. Here’s what the app (when added) looks like:

If you’d like to check out or add the app, you can visit its page here, or you can visit the app’s canvas page here. Feel free to add feature requests to the app’s wall, or just send us a note to info @ claimid.com.

And yes - its been a little quiet here for the past month, but with a wedding and international travel, we’ve been busy! But we’re glad to be back with this new feature for Facebook users.

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!

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.