Manage your online identity.

The Wall Street Journal has written an article entitled You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well. This front-page article has been syndicated to many newspapers around the country, causing substantial buzz. It reflects somewhat of a new reality - that your “search identity” is a resume of sorts. In fact, many employers place a large amount of credibility in search engine results, which is troubling as you don’t have presentational control over your search identity (or what people write about you).

There are a number of companies struggling with this problem currently, and ClaimID is one of them. Techcrunch profiled a number of identity search engines, and services like Reputation Defender can be retained to monitor your identity online. Put simply, there are a number of companies addressing the problem of identity from a number of different perspectives, and the market has not spoken in any particular direction.

Identity is one of the internet’s last great unsolved problems. The reason this is the case is not because of lack of effort, but of the sheer complexity of the problem. Identity search, for example, attempts to disambiguate name-based entities. Essentially, it attempts to tell one John Smith from another, an extremely difficult challenge (many Ph.D.’s have been written on this challenge), and the models we have work best in constrained environments, not the internet.

Beyond the problem of name-based entities, there’s another big problem with the net - the stuff you’ve done but your name doesn’t show up on. Sure, a search algorithm can do basic cocitation analysis to guess at stuff “related” to you, but it won’t find a good deal of the stuff you’ve done, nor will it understand the relationship. The company you worked at, the project that you worked on that was written up in the newspaper that doesn’t mention your name…all of these things present identity search some very serious, potentially unsolvable problems. A computer would need to pass a turing test to fully address this problem - Bayesian models can only take us so far.

The approach that seems to be popular in identity search is a hybrid of search + claiming. Knowing that models will never fully disambiguate or find any one individual, the search engines allow individuals to claim related results, creating a dossier of sorts. Of course, this is the approach we’ve always taken in ClaimID - you know yourself, and we’re not going to try to design an algorithm that knows you better than you do.

Of course, part of me wants to believe that these companies can do it better. I want to see a company come along with an approach that is revolutionary, that promises real results. I believe that the challenges of managing search identity present the information sciences one of its greatest challenges over the next ten years. People need these solutions, and the market is not going to get smaller. But what exactly are the solutions people need?

Outside of the magic laser beam that erases links you hate and raises your favorite links to the top, I think we’ve got to take a reality based approach. Research and work on name-based entities will continue making the models better. Standards and open-source approaches are a must, as identity simply cannot be centralized. The market has proven this again and again. Identity must be decentralized. Finally, we must accept some realities. Largely, people will have their identity searches be mediated by Google. (Google sends a tremendous amount of identity search to ClaimID, with Yahoo search owning a very small part of our traffic.) People will also need trasportable, web-wide solutions. The idea of fixing identity in one place is fine, but what about the rest of the internet? For many, Google is the internet, so we’re just playing in their playground.

As you can see, there are some tremedous challenges in this sector. However, that’s what makes this sector exciting and interesting - its one of the last places on the net you can make real change that will make people’s lives better. And is there a better goal than that? It has certainly kept us motivated here at ClaimID. Ultimately, identity is a solvable problem. Major vendors like Google, IBM and Microsoft might have to start paying better attention, and upstarts certainly will contribute to the discussion. I look forward to the progress to be made in this sector…it will be interesting to watch over the next ten years.

Just a quick reminder that the Internet Identity Workshop will be happening May 14-16 in Mountain View, CA.

May 14-16 in Mountainview at the Computer History Museum.
1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View CA 94043

REGISTER HERE

It will be the same format as usual. We will do a 1/2 day of talks on May 14th starting around 1 and going to 5 with a social dinner to follow. We pick these talks about two weeks ahead of time to reflect the latest and new developments in the field. This format provides an ‘on ramp’ for newbies to orient to the Identity Community and a way others catch up on the latest developments.

Open Space will begin at 8:30 SHARP on May 15th. We will have a full day likely with Speed Geeking after lunch for interoperability and application demo’s. A social dinner will follow.

If you’re interested in online identity, working in online identity, or would just like to see the community in action, make sure to register and attend - we recommend it.

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.

Some very exciting news from AOL - they have enabled all of their AOL accounts with OpenID.  That means that all AOL subscribers and AIM users - over 63 million at my count - now have working OpenIDs.  This is a huge, exciting move.

Oh yeah, if you want to test your AOL OpenIDs, you can leave a comment on the blog - we recently enabled OpenID commenting.  (Yeah, yeah, we know we were late to the party on that.)

I know lots of folks who follow this blog are interested in personal identity management.  I wanted to point you to a new collaboration between the JanRain folks and GNR, the Global Name Registry.  The new site, FreeYourID.com will allow you to have a .name domain with the backend powered by OpenID.  The site is free for 90 days if you’d like to give it a try!

Scott Kveton and Will Norris have written some good reviews of the site, and I love Scott’s thread as you can see debugging and troubleshooting going on in realtime.  Kudos to all involved!

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.