ClaimID: Your Online Identity
For Alexander Wrege, Claim ID, a new identity Web 2.0 project, is a complete success. After setting up a profile on Claim ID, a search for his rare name turns up the new profile in first place:
Not everyone is as lucky as Alex. About half of the claim ID profiles I surveyed did not appear in the first page of Google search results. However, as the domain is nearly a year old, its profile should begin ranking well on Google.
What exactly does Claim ID do? It let’s you associate hyperlinked material (web pages) with your name and a brief personal-biographical statement. In their own words,
ClaimID is a service that lets you claim the information that is about you online. That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn’t about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It’s time to reclaim some power back from the search engines. ClaimID is about letting you have some say in what search engines say about you.
Features
You have control over the following elements of your online life:
- Associate any URL with your name
- Claim websites you own as your own, and verify them
- Associate a biographical statement with your name
- Associate an image with your name
- Organize URLs into groups
There’s also a bookmarklet to help you collect links related to you, a very pretty AJAX-based interface, and a blog to keep updated on Claim ID related news.
Problems
Their privacy policy dictates how account deletion works:
Users may delete their information from our database by deleting their accounts. All personal information will be deleted, but the user’s name will be “locked” so that another user cannot use this name.
This could lead to a large number of names being permanently tied up. Without some form of name recycling, people will have to sign up with “Elliott Back 7889898.” A denial of service attack could be used to void large numbers of names, as well.
Also, the only thing it does right now is create a (name, {url}) binding. While useful, hopefully Claim ID will expand its features in the future.
Conclusion
If you want to see what Claim ID should look like, take a gander at my claim ID profile, which is just a few links and my photo. In a couple years, this will be a powerful identity service.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is tagged with google search results, claim id, life associate, biographical statement, denial of service attack, rare name, google, denial of service, account deletion, number of names, bookmarklet, new identity, search engines, new profile, ajax, related news, recycling, web pages, alexander, alex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
Add New Comment
Viewing 3 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)
9/7/2006 at 12:46 am
[...] If you’re not a search person, skip the rest of this. It might be misleading. You may misread it ...