Manage your online identity.

The wonderful folks at American Public Media’s American RadioWorks are looking for ClaimID users to appear in an hourlong documentary about online identity and self-marketing. This is a great chance to tell your story about online identity, as I know many of you have thought about this entensively.

If you’d like to appear in this documentary, send me an email at fred@claimid.com. I’ll pass your information along to the producer, so make sure you include a way to get in touch. Thanks!!!

Program Description: Design of Desire

An hour-long radio documentary on consumerism including a look at the new importance of online self-marketing

Half of America’s online teens think the Internet has improved their relationships with their friends, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Young people say online identities, in particular, create a way for them to market themselves to their peers. They offer a place where teens can define themselves through bands, videos and photographs; some teens say the Internet frees them up to be more like their “true selves,” without worrying about how they look or are perceived in school.

As teens get older and apply for college admission or employment, online identities can be cast in a new light. American RadioWorks seeks individuals, roughly under the age of 35, for inclusion in a radio documentary. ARW is looking for those who have online identities (profiles, blogs, etc.) and who are using ClaimID. ARW prefers to start speaking with individuals before they begin using Claim ID, in order to follow them throughout their process of using the service.

American RadioWorks is the largest documentary unit in public radio. It creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for the public radio system and the Internet. ARW is based at St. Paul, Minnesota, with staff journalists in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Calif., Boston. Mass., and Duluth, Minn. A full program archive can be found at www.americanradioworks.org.

Via Technorati, I found an excellent post on online reputation management posted to the Engtech blog.  Tim Nash has really thought through some areas of defining your own personal brand, something that I know a lot of ClaimID users find valuable.  He writes about ClaimID:

ClaimID is a simple site which at first glance looks like many other social bookmarking sites but is designed to help you protect your digital identity. It offers several services including acting as an OpenID server, listing your sites and providing you with a microformat hcard.

Each of these is useful. I use OpenID whenever possible to login into site and always use my account from ClaimID. This has two advantages: I only need to remember one password/username combination and my comments can be checked for authenticity, as I have verified my claimID against my domain. ClaimID also allows me to list my forum profiles so people can see which forums I am registered at and using which username. Finally, it lists posts such as this guest blog which I may have done. This is only the tip of the iceberg with ClaimID, but even these simple steps allow people to check that it was me who posted that comment about their mother!

The article is very useful – check it out.

In the past few months, we’ve been spending a lot of our time and energy on OpenID. While we love OpenID and think it is the future, most of you didn’t join ClaimID just because we provided OpenID. Our goal at ClaimID is to address the full picture of online identity, and we believe that your online identity starts with the links that are about you.

In the next few months, we’ll be walking through some of our pre-exsisting features, with a goal of letting more people know about them, and to provide a more robust documentation set for the features (killing two birds with one stone – brilliant!).

Today, we’re going to walk through “Link Status Checking.” The idea behind this feature is really simple – if there are links out there about you, you want to know when they change or go offline. For example – let’s say you’re pointing to a newspaper article, and that newspaper article disappears into the archives. You’d want to know about that and update your profile accordingly. Just as it is important to create a profile, it is important to know that your profile is up to date and valid. So we’ll do that work for you

How to enable link status checking:

To enable link status checking, edit your account settings, and enable the “Alert me if my claimed links go offline” option.

What it does:

Every day, our link status checking robot will go out and make sure all of your links are there. If they don’t show up for a period of time, we’ll send you an email that lets you know the link has gone offline. You can then take the appropriate action.

Example:

So here is an example of a link I pointed to where the hyperlink changed:

I had pointed to the Lyceum staff webpage, but that was moved. So ClaimID emailed me, let me know. I updated the link to point to the right location, silenced the alert, and my profile was back, as good as new. Of course I’m biased, but I think this is pretty cool. If employers are Googling you, you want to know what is out there about you, and what has gone offline.

Hope some of you give this feature a try. We’ll be highlighting more of these features in the upcoming weeks.

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 .

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.

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!