Manage your online identity.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!
It’s finally live and I’d like to take this opportunity to announce we’re leaving our beloved beta.
Our registration form is now ready and willing to take your information and create a new claimID account. Come on in.
However, if you already have an OpenID account somewhere else on the web (LiveJournal, MyOpenID, Verisign’s PIP, etc.), you can create an account here without needing a password. We’ll still need to verify your email address - but passwords? So last year.
A small community has already begun to grow around our user base and we hope to add to the ranks in the coming weeks. We’ve got mailing lists for users and developers to communicate with one another and with us.
We’re going out of our way to be open and forthcoming with everything you see at claimID. Identity is too important to play games and it’s too personal to cover with ads. Join us and help make claimID better.
Anyone see those ninjas this time around? Love that.
Since we rolled out MicroID verification, we’ve seen lots of people using the service. That’s so cool - we’re really thrilled to see it take off. At the same time, we’re also more than willing to admit that our implementation is kind of hard and limited. It’s hard because, well, you have to edit a page to add in your MicroID, and it’s limited because there are lots of pages you can claim that you can’t necessarily edit - like your flickr or del.icio.us page. Naturally, we decided it was time to solve this problem.
Before we delve into particulars, take a second and think about how you trust things on the web. You trust your friend’s sites because at one time or another they said “Hey, go check out my Flickr pictures”, or they sent you an email with their del.icio.us links. That’s how we trust people in real life, too. You meet someone, ask them where they went to school or how many siblings they have - trust has to start somewhere. When you meet someone new, you don’t completely trust them. You learn from them, verify, and renegotiate your trust. This pattern happens cyclically until you decide they are the kind of person you wouldn’t mind having for a roommate, or the kind of person you wouldn’t loan twenty bucks to (my grad student mind state slips though again).
Well, so that’s how we do things on the web, too. But on the web, things are a little different. We’re global, we can’t always look each other in the eye, we need things like https and PGP. We want a level of verification - a way to actually prove that things are part of our production. Using the MicroID, we create a web of trust. When you take your ClaimID and verify your sites with MicroID, you’re creating trust relationships; if someone trusts your Flickr, why should they trust your claimID? Well, if you verify your Flickr to your claimID, you’ve just created bi-directional trust. People can enter the web anywhere, and transverse your trusted web - rather than create a single place of trust, you’ve decentralized - an idea that makes a lot more sense than just asking people to trust you at face value.
When we dropped MicroID into ClaimID, we thought that it was a neat way to give people what they wanted in terms of link verification, and not a lot more. But as we’ve gone to the whiteboard, thought about it, talked to people about it, scratched our heads and gawked at the simplicity of it all - we realized that MicroID could quite literally change the social nature of trust on the web. These are big concepts, and rather than dumping it all here, I’ve written it up on two posts on my blog. The first post covers the why’s of using MicroID to create a system of social trust, and the second post covers the hows for content providers.
So what does all this mean? Well, we’ve been hit by a bolt of lightning on this idea. As MicroID is a standard, we’ve officially contacted both Flickr and del.icio.us to see if they would implement MicroID automatically for your pages - meaning you could claim your sites in these pages, but it means a whole lot more. It means leverage - leverage to get other big names to start adopting MicroID - so you can make verifiable claims of ownership on your content, so you can create webs of trust on the internet.
If you’d like to help us get started, head over to the Flickr ideas forum and add your “me too’s” to the MicroID idea. Now, we’ve contacted Flickr (both officially and back channel) and this ain’t gonna happen overnight - but if you show your support, it just might help Flickr realize the value of MicroID. To show our support for MicroID, we’ve released a standard perl implementation of a MicroID verifier under the GPL. We believe in this technology, and we’re willing to help get people start using this important standard. You can download a tarball or zip file.
So this is a big concept - a little MicroID could change the nature of trust on the web. And I’m sure I didn’t explain it so well (hopefully I’ll draw up some diagrams pretty soon, but my Photoshop skills are…well, you’ve seen em). However, if this notion has caught your interest, you’ll probably want to review my posts, the MicroID FAQ, and the MicroID home page. We’re on to something big here - please consider joining us.
It sort of took us too long to get our act together regarding this, but we’ve finally added some ClaimID mailing lists. These lists will be an unmoderated place where ClaimID users can meet and discuss, find solutions to problems, request (gulp) features ;), etc.
Right now we have two mailing lists. The first is claimID-users, which is the general purpose mailing list. This is the list everyone should be on. You’ll find out about new features, requests for testing, that sort of stuff.
The second list is claimID-developers, which is a list for people building applications that use the claimID API. If you’re on this list, be sure you’re also on claimID users. We expect claimID-developers to be a low-traffic list for the time being.
In other news, the big weekend maintenance went well - there’s more work for us to do, but we’re getting it done. We hope to be making some fairly big announcements in the next week or two. We’re in Boston in a few hours for the identity mash-up. See you there!
A great number of people have asked us for verification, and we’ve listened. I’m proud to announce that ClaimID now offers verification of your ClaimID links. Here’s a peek at my ClaimID page, with verification (purple highlight mine):
If you look next to the link, you’ll see “Verified.” This means that ClaimID has verified that I’m the owner of the pages I’ve claimed (We’ll probably come up with a verified logo at some point…or is text elegant enough?).
The verification process is very simple. We provide you with a MicroID that you embed in your claimed page. We then go out and check to see if the MicroID is there, and the rest is history. MicroID, developed earlier this year by Jeremie Miller, is a simple identity microformat. We think MicroID is perfect for this purpose - if you want to learn more, visit the MicroID website or blog.
To get started verifying your links, just log in to your ClaimID account and hover over your links - you’ll see a link called Verify. Once you click Verify, you’ll get a code snippet to embed in your page. After you embed the snippet, you just click a link and we go and check the MicroID. Like everything with ClaimID, we’ve kept this absolutely simple. (This process is also thoroughly documented in our help section)
A word about claiming things. Obviously, most of us won’t be able to claim everything on our ClaimID. We can’t edit pages that we don’t own - at least legally :). So don’t sweat that you can’t verify everything. Verify the stuff you can, or want to. Link verification is a big first step toward making ClaimID a verified place. We’ve got big things in the works with identity verification, too. People have asked, and we’ve listened. Let us know what you think!
A few days ago, the Automattic team released Widgets for Wordpress. Widgets are little handy drag-and-drop tools for your Wordpress blog. We’ve built a simple widget for ClaimID users that lists your recent ClaimID links. Keep in mind, you’ll need Wordpress 2.0 or greater, with the Widgets plugin enabled. You can read more about the requirements here. To install the ClaimID widget, follow these simple directions:
If you log in to your claimID account, you can find extensive directions (in our help documentation, and in the account extras section in your account). If you’re comfortable with wordpress widgets, however, the claimID widget should be quite painless to install. Thanks to Riccardo Cambiassi for motivating us to develop this widget; if you have any problems or suggestions, please let us know. We’ll also lobby Wordpress.com for inclusion of our widget, and we’ll let you know how that goes.
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