Manage your online identity.

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.

Our friends over at JanRain released Jyte today - Jyte is a fun application that lets you make claims on anything (Mailing lists are rubbish, Emacs is better than vi), and it is strongly tied to OpenID.  I’ve had a bunch of fun voting on claims today, and if you want to check it out, all you need to do is sign in with your OpenID (your ClaimID URL or any other OpenID).

Congrats to the entire JanRain team on the launch of this cool product!

A few days ago, Simon Willison introduced idproxy.net, a service that allows you to use you Yahoo! credentials to log in to any OpenID website.  Idproxy serves as a proxy between Yahoo’s browser-based authentication and OpenID, essentially allowing you to use your Yahoo credentials as an OpenID. Kudos to Simon for creating such an innovative tool, and we love the fact ClaimID’s logo is on the front page :).

Great post from Sam Ruby explaining how to OpenID-enable your blog/website/etc.  Says Sam:

Based on the results of my Unobtrusive OpenID post, it is quite evident that there is a lot of partial knowledge about OpenID out there.  While my knowledge on the subject is far from complete, this post is my attempt to share what I have learned with others.

Of course, you can use your ClaimID as your OpenID in any of these examples.  Enjoy!

Over the past few days, a good number of posts about OpenID crossed my feed reader.  These posts had made it to the front page of Digg, Del.icio.us - meaning lots of good eyeballs for OpenID.  Here are some examples:

• Simon Willison - How to turn your blog into an OpenID.  A great post about how to make your blog an openID.  Of course you can use your claimID URL as your OpenID in this fantastic howto.
• Six Apart Weblog - OpenID’s Growing Momentum.  The folks at Six Apart have been using OpenID for a long time - these forward thinkers speculate on some of OpenID’s momentum going forward.
• O’Reilly Radar - OpenID on the Upswing.  O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest checks in on OpenID and shows Google Trends data.

These are great links, with lots of resources.  Here are some other cool links we’ve come across:

• ClaimID Weblog - OpenID Resources.  Ahem Just a good collection of links to everything OpenID.
• Adam Fortuna - MicroID, the coolest technology from 2006 you’ve never heard of.  Not OpenID, but MicroID is very dear to our heart - Adam contributes code and explains MicroID.

OpenID is an organic phenomenon, but all of this great coverage wouldn’t happen without the hard work of professional instigators like Scott Kveton and Chris Messina.  And the phenomenon wouldn’t be anywhere near it is today without the hard work of coders like Brian Ellin who have contributed so much open source OpenID code.

2007 looks like an exciting year for OpenID and ClaimID.  This identity stuff is really starting to catch on.  We knew that it would take a little time, that we’d have to be slow and a little methodological, but the reality is people need identity solutions.  In the next year, we’re going to work hard to deliver those solutions to you, all the while keeping ClaimID a simple, trustworthy and useful place.

I returned from the IIW in Mountain View with newfound excitement for this identity layer we’re all building together.

Six months ago, there was a sense of the coming tide of interoperability with the convergence around CardSpace and OpenID and what the Higgins project was doing/planning. Today, the coming tide is lapping on the beach. There were a great many demos up and running, on multiple platforms, doing things with ease. In fact, most of the demos were quite boring (the standard “single sign-on demo problem”) since there was nothing to “see” as a user. You click, and you’re in!

I suspect the next IIW will be *much* more corporate. There were about 3 sessions run by people who were not “standards guys” trying to get a conversation going about making money with this stuff. This was 3 more than six months ago. It’s changing quickly…

All that said, I think the next big thing is providing a reputation layer on top of the identity layer. Still a year(?) or two out, claimID seems positioned to be a strong early player in that space. Time will tell.

I posted a little more about my week in California over here:

I’m here at the Internet Identity Workshop and have been having a number of great conversations. The quality of the discussions is high and the number of demos is remarkable. Only seven months ago when I was in Mountain View for the earlier IIW2006, there were a couple demos of near-working implementations and a lot of excitement about what the next few months were going to unleash as these systems started to come online. It’s also when the idea was first hatched to bake OpenID into claimID. So long ago.

A great many things have happened since then. Higgins is now demoing live open source implementations of a variety of tools, including Bandit, around the newly announced OpenID 2.0 spec. We have full OpenID 1.1 libraries in all the major programming languages. OpenID 2.0 code should be rolling out within a couple weeks from a number of the vendors here. Dick Hardt of Sxip demoed the newly announced Sxipper Firefox plugin. There was a Safari InfoCard Selector demo complete with modal overlays. There were a surprising number of demos (Java, even) fully functioning with versions of Microsoft’s CardSpace (coming baked into every copy of Vista in a few short months). Avery Glasser of VxV Solutions demoed his company’s voiceprint technology fully integrated and interoperable with OpenID. JanRain demoed their new BotBouncer site designed to serve as a centralized CAPTCHA repository so users can know a particular OpenID has passed a humanness test.

At ClaimID, we’re pretty enamored with OpenID. OpenID is going to make all of our lives easier, it makes our company more useful and valuable, and more and more smart companies are adopting the standard. That’s pretty exciting to us. I thought it might be useful to collect together some OpenID resources - so we can give our users a little roadmap to OpenID. Feel free to bookmark this to return at a later date (like, when OpenID takes over the world), and of course feel free to add your favorite OpenID resources to the comments below.

1 - What is OpenID?

• OpenID website - Start here. This site has all the information you need on the distributed identity system that actually works.
• OpenID Wikipedia entry - A very robust entry that covers a lot of the ongoing developments with OpenID. Do yourself a favor and just bookmark it now.
• About OpenID - Brian Ellin’s bullet list description of OpenID with great links and Japanese translation.

2 - How does OpenID Work?

• How does OpenID work? - Identity master Phil Windley breaks down OpenID into remarkably human-digestable terms with a great diagram.
• OpenID Protocol Specification - This is the source for information on OpenID 1.0 and 2.0. Geeky, but, hey, it is a protocol after all.
• Another protocol walkthrough - This one is from Dag Arneson, and it has some great comments.

3 - OpenID Resource Sites

• OpenIDenabled.com - This site, from the wonderful folks at JanRain, is host to tons of great information on OpenID. Documentation, protocol specs, how-to’s, FAQ’s - this site is extremely valuable.
• IwantMyOpenID.org - The OpenID community marketing site and home to the OpenID 50,000 dollar bounty. Headed by Scott Kveton, this effort has had remarkable progress so far.
• OpenID Mailing Lists - If you’re part of the OpenID community, you’re going to want to join this list. The latest list to be added is the necessary user-experience list.

4 - I want OpenID! Where can I get (and use) an OpenID?

• ClaimID. Did you know that everyone who joins ClaimID gets an OpenID? Sure, you get all the other good stuff - caching, status monitoring, verification - but you also get an OpenID that you can use all over the net. We admit slight bias here.
• All the other places. OpenID providers are springing up all over the net. The lists keep growing and growing! If you must use someone other than ClaimID for OpenID, we’re partial to JanRain’s MyOpenID.com, as this site is updated frequently and is very reliable.
• Where can I use an OpenID? Sites include LiveJournal, Technorati, ClaimID, Wikitravel and Zooomr, with new ones being added frequently.

5 - I am advanced. I want some OpenID Software.

• Ok, you’ve gulped the kool-aid. And now you want to implement OpenID on your site. I would encourage you to check out the following resources: OpenID.net’s list of OpenId Libraries, OpenIDEnabled’s list of OpenID Libraries, EastMedia’s RoR OpenID Server, and the OpenID bounty site. Technorati or Google searches on OpenID libraries will likely also keep you in the know about recent OpenID developments as developers post them to their blogs.

6 - OpenID Bloggers.

• Scott Kveton - This is the blog to follow for news about OpenID. (RSS)
• Johannes Ernst - Useful information from the Netmesh founder. (RSS)
• Chris Messina - OpenID advocate and evangelist. (RSS)
• Kaliya Hamlin - The nexus of grassroots identity. (RSS)
• Planet OpenID - Meta-blog for the OpenID community. (RSS)

I hope you all find this useful - please help us build on this resource by adding your ideas to the comment thread. We see OpenID as a very powerful and useful tool, and we hope you’ll join us by trying it out!

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.

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”.

ClaimID proudly announces it has joined a consortium of ten forward-thinking companies to fund the development and adoption of OpenID. ClaimID utilizes OpenID, a standards-based identity protocol; it lets you do cool stuff like log into LiveJournal or Wikipedia (very soon!) with your claimID URL. Not only is that cool, it just makes sense - OpenID is decentralized, scalable, easy-to-use and it saves you from having to create new accounts at every site you log into.

Announced by JanRain CEO Scott Kveton at OSCON, the consortium’s first project is an OpenID code bounty. The consortium will offer $5,000 to ten open source projects that successfully implement OpenID. I know what you’re thinking - “$5,000 to implement OpenID - sign me up!” Well, there are a few conditions. Your project must be OSI licensed, and there must be either 5,000 downloads a month or 200,000 users of publicly installed instances. Software like Wordpress, phpBB, Drupal or Joomla are great examples - and you can suggest others. Not only will each of these projects be getting $5,000, but they will also be investing in the future of identity, and making it easier for people to use their projects. It is a win-win all around.

The consortium is made up of forward-thinking companies that share a goal to make identity better on the net. They are Verisign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity, Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, NetMesh, Sxip and claimID. We’re looking to expand our consortium, so if you’re interested in supporting this important cause, please contact us. The coordinating site, located at http://iwantmyOpenID.com, and bounty program were organized by the OpenID community.

We’re so happy to be able to take part in this very important goal. We feel that OpenID is great way to give people the identity solutions they need. With this bounty program and consortium, we hope that people will take this opportunity to collaborate, converse and compromise. We’re convinced we’ve made a great decision in supporting OpenID, its community and this consortium, and we look forward to the important progress this initiative will make.