Manage your online identity.

Yes, it has been too long since we last posted!  In the meantime, ClaimID has grown steadily, we’ve optimized a bunch of code so that the site should be much faster, and we’re looking at new ways to improve the site.  To that extent, we are considering two things.  The first is finding some better solution for our OpenID service.  There are a number of third parties who do the checkboxes -and-security stuff better than we do.  Delegating OpenID authentication to a third party might be a nice solution for our users.  We are also considering a pay model for ClaimID - something like 12 dollars for a two-year membership.  We would still provide OpenID’s for free, but we would charge for value-adds like link resume and caching, etc.  Of course, all users with existing accounts would be grandfathered in with free accounts - this would only apply to new users (and OpenID’s would always be free for all users).  Unfortunately, running ClaimID is not cheap, so we’re going to strive for a model that is both sustainable and secure.  None of this is written in stone, so we’re very open to feedback!

This morning, claimID reached a milestone we’ve been eyeing for a few weeks.

50,000 users

This is a big deal for us, as our service is fairly unique among identity companies. We’re hyper-focused and we’re free. We’ve had incremental, steady growth since we launched over two years ago.

Each user is an important piece of the greater goal - a better understanding and collective awareness of how important the identity layer will be as our work and personal applications become more people-based. Identity stands alone as the next major shift in how we communicate through the mediated space of the Internet. Being able to verify claims made by the person ‘on the other end’ will continue to become more and more important.

OpenID is an elegant way forward - and we’re very glad to be playing our part.

Thanks to everyone who’s proudly displaying their claimID profiles on pages far and wide.

On to the next 50k!

I saw today that Mike Cochrane added MicroID support to the open source micro-blogging project, Laconica, a few days ago. His own ‘tweet’ or ‘dent’ about the patch is at Identi.ca and sure enough, his account was auto-verified on his claimID page.

Good stuff Mike.

Another win for MicroID - and so Identi.ca is duly added to our list of Known MicroID Publishers. However, in actuality, any Laconica installation is now MicroID enabled. As more of these sites come online, please let us know and we’ll get them listed as well.

Continuing our publicity tour around the UK, we see that ClaimID has popped up in a summary of news items about reputation management in The Times. We were also pleasantly surprised to see ClaimID show up in Marie Claire, as discovered in the print edition by one of my family members. Our empire expands everyday!

ClaimID and a number of other identity management were recently feature in the New Scientist article Don’t let cyber-spite ruin your good name.

So how can you protect your reputation online” Various companies are now offering to help, by managing what is written about you on the web. ClaimID, founded by Terrell Russell and Fred Stutzman, is a free service that allows users to collect, annotate and verify information that is either about them, or written by them, such as blogs, websites or news articles mentioning them. The result is a list of links to websites the users have approved. “You can think of it as an online link resumé,” says Russell.

This means that when people search for your name they will come across your ClaimID profile, which brings together all the online material you want. “The things that are about you online, the people you know, the contacts you make - they all equate to a reputation,” says Stutzman.

Check it out here!

A few days ago, we rolled out ID Selector at ClaimID. Designed by the wonderful folks at JanRain, ID Selector is a nifty technology that makes the OpenID sign-in process significantly easier. Here’s what it looks like:

The ID Selector makes it easy to recall your OpenID when you’re logging into a site, solving a plethora of problems that occur when OpenID’s proliferate.  We know this will make it easier for you to log in to OpenID, and we also hope that this will drive some more of that sweet OpenID-consuming that is required to push this movement forward.

If you’d like an ID Selector from your website, simply sign up with IDSelector.com.  Great work to Brian and Co. at JanRain!

The past year has been an exciting one for OpenID. Millions of OpenID’s have been created, thousands of sites support OpenID, and a growing ecosystem of fans, developers and advocates are proving that an open approach to identity makes sense. As the network of value around OpenID grows, our OpenID providers need to be trustworthy and secure. ClaimID has long been one of the most trusted OpenID providers on the net; while we offer banking-quality security, we felt it was time to take our product to the next level.

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 heard from Alex Kohlhofer (plasticshore) a couple days ago about Weewar adding MicroID support.  We checked it out and everything seems to work flawlessly.  Great work guys.

We’ve added weewar.com to our list of autoverified domains (aka Known MicroID Publishers) and hope to continue seeing that list grow!

For completeness… Alex’s Weewar profile

Some great news from Micah Laaker of MyBlogLog - they’re now supporting MicroID’s on their profile pages.  If you’re a MBL user, you can now claim your page to ClaimID or any other service that supports MicroID.  Awesome!

Thanks to Adam Rice, who pointed out that our ClaimID Wordpress widget wasn’t valid XHTML. He sent along a handy fix, which we’ve added and uploaded. You can download the latest ClaimID Wordpress Widget (zip file) here . Thanks Adam!