Manage your online identity.

Scott Allen wrote earlier today about his recent survey results for Rapleaf. The survey reports that consumers say ratings of the seller are the most important factor to determine their level of trust as they move through a purchasing decision.

“Credibility is key,” wrote one respondent, “and I think it’s difficult to establish in a classified ad. How can you develop trust in you, your product, your service, in just a few lines?”

Scott goes on to write:

Several respondents expressed a desire to have ratings be available across sites. In response to the question, “What one or two things do you feel could be done to best increase the trust between buyers and sellers,” replies included:

“I like eBay’s feedback concept, although I wish there was a centralized version of this, so I could see how their feedback looks from other places (craigslist sales, Barnes and Nobles used book sales, etc.) and so people could take their feedback scores with them.”

“Reputations systems are important, and being able to understand a person’s reputation across multiple sites would be a boon (in other words, to blend, say, MySpace ratings and eBay ratings).”

“Some sort of due diligence, much like eBay’s rating system. I think also that it would be good to have some sort of overall trusted vendor rating for use on the entire internet.”

claimID can help provide this type of service as well - indirectly. We don’t have tight integration with individual services, but if MicroID becomes more of a standard around the web, we stand a very good chance of becoming a clearinghouse where buyers and sellers can look to find additional risk-averting information.

Embed a link to your claimID in your auction profile.

Put it on your homepage. Link to it from your email.

Allow others to trust you a little more by seeing your online identity - the identity you’ve constructed from all across the Internet - the identity you manage.

And lots of ‘em. If you want to swap out the claimID logo on your blog or website, cruise over to http://claimid.com/media (also linked internally, of course) and grab one of our many, many new logos. I really dig the white chicklet…I might have to switch mine up

We’ve always been big fans of Microformats, particularly the hCard. Lots of you have told us you’re pleased that the hCard is a part of claimID - and we’ve always thought that’s cool. However, our implementation of hCard has always been a little, well, weak. In the past, your claimID hCard was just your name and URL - as of today, we’ve expanded this. If you’d like to expand your hCard to one that includes things like your company, address, phone number - just log in and edit your account settings.

As you can see, we’ve added a bunch of field that will automatically create a more robust hCard for you (including your picture, too). At the same time, we’ve also updated the hCard snippet so you can easily post this better hCard to your blog or website. We hope you enjoy!

Update: To compliment this improved hCard, we’ve added automatic pinging to the pingerati.net server. Pingerati is a neat service that enables Microformat search, and we’re happy to support it - while enabling you at the same time. Neat stuff.

Update 2: After some gentle prodding from Sebastian Küpers, we’ve added country to the hCard. Missed that one

Update 3: More fun with Microformats. All claimID pages are now marked up with the xFolk microformat.

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!

You can now log in to LiveJournal, TypeKey and Zooomr with your ClaimID URL? That’s right! If you’d like to leave comments on someone’s LiveJournal with your ClaimID, just log in and use “http://claimid.com/yourusername” as the OpenID url. It’s the same with Zooomr, just log in with your ClaimID and you can create an account without creating a password.

Whoa. That’s cool. Our first step towards verification was the addition of MicroID, so you can verify your pages to your ClaimID. With the second step of OpenID, you can now use your ClaimID to log in places around the net, and you can verify other OpenID’s to your account. You can really start to build that trusted web of identity.

We’ve always said that ClaimID wasn’t going to be a typical veified service. We didn’t want your social security number or your fingerprint. We knew there was a better way. With MicroID and OpenID, ClaimID users can create real, verified identites without having to mess with the kind of info that thieves like to steal. The best part is, we’re just getting started. This is getting kinda fun, isn’t it?

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!

Josh Peek has produced a nice little snippet showing how to use the ClaimID API with Ruby. This should come in handy to folks working to integrate a custom ClaimID feed into your blog, mobile app or whatever. A sincere thanks to Josh for creating this - we’ve also linked to this snippet from our internal API page as well, should you need it.

In other news, we came across a fantastic post covering ClaimID from the new PostBubble blog (a joint venture of ACS and Webreakstuff). I really took this post to heart, so I wrote a personal reply over on my blog. If you’re interested in what people say or think about us, I’d recommend a read - this post really captures the essence of the problem we’re trying to solve. Here’s a snippet:

It is visionary, it has the flexibility to go everywhere, and it solves global problems that are only going to become more global as time goes by. There is more to claimID than just managing your online identity. ClaimID is going to become a currency for individuals. It will be your online credit card, drivers license, or even alter-ego. It’s like oxygen. It is pervasive, will be everywhere, and has the chance to do so many different things that trying to isolate a simple business model and predict where it will go is like predicting the weather. We all know how good our weather prediction is, I don’t need to spell that out. So this is what bothered me about claimID. Those guys are onto something that will be so normal I can barely articulate why its so good. All I can say is good job, you’ll swim because you are Normal.

Finally, if you’ve developed anything with the ClaimID API that you’d like to share, drop us a line and let us know. We’d love to link to it here, and on our internal pages.

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!

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just posted a new study on home broadband adoption.  The takeaway of the study is the second half of the study’s subtitle: Home broadband adoption is going mainstream and that means user-generated content is coming from all kinds of internet users.  Pew’s key findings include:

• 48 million internet users have posted content to the internet and the large
  majority of them are home broadband users.
• Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet.
• An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet.

As you can imagine, seeing statistics like these makes us feel rather validated in our work.  Almost 50 million of us are leaving our digital footprints online - footprints that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.  We’ll want tools to manage our online identities; here at ClaimID, we’re thinking of new strategies every day.

You can download the whole Pew report here.  It is fascinating.