Manage your online identity.

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.

At ClaimID, it has always been our goal to make identity on the web fun, simple and relatively painless for you. We’ve built a company around the values of trust, openness and real desire to help people. After watching the growth in the OpenID space in the past few months, we at ClaimID have made a decision to shift our emphasis. As of this morning, ClaimID is going to concentrate its business on being the web’s finest free OpenID identity provider.

So what does this mean? If you log in, you’ll see new documentation and features like easy code snippets to make your blog or website an OpenID, but in reality not a lot has changed. When we were building ClaimID, we created a tool that allowed you to simply and easily create a powerful web profile. As it happens, we feel this web profile (with things like MicroID verification) provide the perfect companion for an OpenID. Let’s face it - if your OpenID is going to represent your identity online, don’t you want to be able to create a robust profile that verifiably shows people who you are?

At ClaimID, our strength has always been translating the complex into the simple. We want to give you the best solutions, without requiring you to read a protocol or understand code. As web identity plays a greater role in all of our lives, we feel that we can really help people by enabling them with solutions simply. And as OpenID grows (and it will grow, says Bill Gates), we want to be there to help you take advantage of this amazing and useful tool.

We thank the tens of thousands of you who have signed up to ClaimID in our first few months in business, your support and encouragement has been amazing. As we embark on this slightly new direction, we welcome your feedback, ideas and criticism. Only through community support can we build an OpenID provider “for the rest of us”, and we look forward to working with all of you on this goal.

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

A new feature for those of you perhaps more heavily involved in the identity space…

We’ve just rolled out i-names support here at claimID. If you already have an i-name, you can now add it to your account in addition to your other OpenIDs. If you don’t have one, here is a list of registrars.

More i-names information is available at inames.net and iwantmynamenow.com.

Thanks again to JanRain for the libraries that “just work”.

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.

Sometimes when we release updates we secretly hope they are going to change the world.  Hmm, well this one probably isn’t going to change the world, but it is going to be very useful to you.  Starting this morning, claimID has added in link status checking.

For many of us, our claimID’s are made up of stuff that we link to but don’t control.  As the internet is well, the internet, sometimes this stuff goes offline.  As this stuff represents your identity, you want to know when it isn’t there - but you’re too busy to check it every day.  Here’s the solution - we’ll do it for you.

Basically, if you enable link status checking, we’ll send a little monkey out once a day to make sure all of the links in your claimID are online.  If our little monkey doesn’t find a link on your claimID for a few days, we’ll send you an email letting you know that one of your links has gone offline.  This way you will always know what is going on with the stuff that represents your identity online.  Indeed, this is very useful.

Couple of caveats with this, however.  We’re claiming a big, fat alpha on this service.  Accurately checking all of the types of stuff people claim in ClaimID is not a trivial task.  As we ramp this up, we know there are going to be false-positive cases we’re going to have to account for.  We won’t be able to accurately check everything - however, we will be able to accurately check a good proportion of links in ClaimID.

If you’d like to take advantage of Link Status Checking, all you need to do is log in to your account, and select the little radio button that says “Alert me if my claimed links go offline”.  Please work with us and send us bug reports on false positives (or false negatives) to bugs@claimid.com.

We hope that you find this service useful.  It is our goal to make it easy for you to manage your identity - and we hope that the link status checker saves you lots of time as you attempt to keep track of what is about you online.  We’ll be robustifying this in the future, and possibly even adding in some pay options for advanced checking.  Anyway, give it a shot, and let us know what you think!

Yesterday, Noah Kagan linked to a great startup advice list entitled 17 Pithy Insights for Startup Founders. It’s reminiscent of another great list by Blogger founder Evan Willians entitled Ten Rules for Web Startups. We found Williams’ list very early on in the ClaimID process and really took it to heart.

Lists like these commonly feature a core piece of advice with which I agree wholeheartedly. In the pithy list, it is “At the end of each day, ask yourself: “Did the product get better for customers today?”. If you don’t have a good answer, stay up until you do.” Put simply, a startup should make its product better each day. Of course, that doesn’t mean your work is always customer-facing - some days your work might only be blogging or responding to emails. However, the lifeblood of a startup is feeding it with new thought, bugfixes, features - stuff that should be done daily. You must constantly work to make your product better.

Today, we’ve made our product better. Michael Biven and a number of others in the ClaimID community wanted to make groups collapsible so browsing large ClaimID’s was easier. So this morning, we rolled it live, and now you can collapse groups in ClaimID. Indeed, that’s a small improvement. However, the thing about small improvements is that they add up to big improvements. And when the requests come from the community, you know you’re making things better for the people who matter the most.

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.