I just learned about a really nifty service on the web called ClaimID. It operates as both an OpenID provider and as a way for your to “claim” your online identity. Enter your URLs (or use the handy bookmarklet) for your various social website pages (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.), articles you’ve written, blogs you read/write and any other information about you that you would like others to know about. You can even claim information about yourself that you don’t necessarily want people to misinterpret – each claimed URL can be annotated with any information you want to give about it. I’m currently adding all of my social sites, articles and “stuff” from around the web into it now.
One of the coolest parts of the claiming process, in my opinion, is the fact that you can designate things as being “about you – by you”, “about you – not by you”, “not about you – by you” or you can “describe it your way” instead. It gives you very granular control of what the various pieces and parts of your identity that are on the web mean. You can also group items that you add. Currently I have “My Links” (the default group) and “My Articles”, but I may start adding in stuff like “My Mailing List Answers” or “My Presentation Information”.
The OpenID part of it is also pretty interesting. You can use your ClaimID url as an OpenID username anywhere that accepts OpenID, or you can use your blog’s/website’s URL by adding in a bit of code to that site. Services like this could make OpenID take off – which would be incredibly cool!
If you join up with ClaimID and want to be my contact, my ClaimID url is http://claimid.com/robinhastings – see you there!
