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. |
4 Responses to “ClaimID: Your Online Identity”
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it’s a good idea… there’s a lot of misidentification on the web these days…
it’s fun to see who else is running around with your name, tho. In my case, there are quite a few women with my name…
Hey Elliot!
Came across your website while ego-surfing.
I actually contacted the claimID guys a weeks ago concerning the ranking of claimID profiles. Every once in a while, my claimID page would not turn up on the first search page (sometimes not at all).
Here’s their response:
Google maintains a distributed “copy” of its index over its hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of servers. At any one time, the index on one server may not be the same as the index on another - especially as new stuff is being indexed. Generally, it will take a little while for the index to normalize over all of Google - what you’re probably seeing is an artifact of that process.
So basically the answer is this - Google knows about your page, but it’s trying to work out how to index it over all machines. It will come back, it will just take a little time. The best way to ensure the page shows up is to link to it - so if you have a webpage or blog, make sure you’re linking to it.
[...] If you’re not a search person, skip the rest of this. It might be misleading. You may misread it for cynicism or think I am being negative. Please leave now and don’t allow yourself to be so deceived. But if you understand search, what the heck is ClaimID? Third party links page a-la Bruce Clay circa 2001, but executed overtly and as a business model? Bottom feeding on people with very unique names, who think this is the answer to their SEO/PR problem, and listing the faithful as “favorite examples in the wild“? Look at those names…Brian Benzinger, Stowe Boyd, Ottmar Liebert, Alex Muntada, Patrick Cormier, Derek Punsalan. It doesn’t get much more unique than some of these. They cna rank themselves with a small handful of links… internals even! It’s not like their non-web offline citizens… these are all bloggers! Link bait sure, but as a company? Building a community of followers, sure, but ones who could be enlightened with a pen light? At first I thought it was a back door way to build a resume site, but there are too many blog posts, dutifuly commented by The Creators, for a bait ‘n switch like that. This is a pea grean and light blue, rounded-corner grab at something for sure. But what? [...]
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