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 download movies. 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.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Not only are we proud to support this bill of rights, but I’m happy to report that we’re also in compliance with it.  At ClaimID, we’ve long innovated in the open-identity space; our work with MicroID and our deployment of OpenID-based social networks stand in evidence.  At the same time, we’ve always respected your identity rights, giving our users control to do what they’d like with their data.  We’ve always known that being open and forthwith is the right approach, and we’re certainly pleased to see these values gaining so much traction.

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.

ClaimID (http://www.claimid.com) is a free online identity management service. ClaimID allows claimants to aggregate and annotate online information that is about them or created by them. ClaimID “gives people rather than a search engine, control over their identity.” (http://www.claimid.com/faq)  In addition to ClaimID’s online resume function, the site’s loose structure encourages claimants to create descriptive categories (e.g. blogs, networks, links, photo-sharing) to which they can add content. A ClaimID resume is a dynamic document. Claimants often include links to flickr on their ClaimID page.

We love it!  In other news, Peter St. Andre has been hard at work completing versions .01 and .02 of the MicroID spec.  This is extremely valuable to the MicroID movement.  If you’re interested in contributing to the ongoing efforts with MicroID, please consider joining the MicroID mailing list.

In other news, happy 2007 to everyone!  We’ve got some great stuff planned in 2007, first and foremost of which is this recently-completed hardware migration that has ClaimID running all sorts of snappy.   Best to everyone – thank you for joining us in claiming your identity.

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!

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!

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.

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.

So, if you’d like to check out our poster, you can download it here. We tried to keep it simple – just a way to show what ClaimID is in a glance.

In other news, if you’d like a different look at ClaimID, we were delighted to see we were included in the latest Command N episode. Thanks to Amber Mac for thinking of us – again!