Posts Tagged: claimid

Noticed / Thoughts — 1 Comment
4
Jun 06

On Inspiration

Running a small “Web 2.0″ company is an interesting experience. I don’t suppose it is much different from running any other company, except for the fact you live and die by the blogosphere. Every day, a few times a day I check the various ClaimID watchlists – Technorati, Feedster, Sphere, Google News – and see what people are saying about ClaimID. It’s addicting, it’s time-wasting, and each time I hit refresh the anticipation feels like Christmas Eve.

ClaimID has captured the imagination of a lot of bloggers. It is such a simple concept that many are compelled to write – and of course, we read everything that’s written. You develop a thick skin because you have to – even though response to ClaimID has been overwhelmingly positive, I’d be lying if I said the negative posts don’t hurt. Anyone who has invested their heart and soul into an idea winces when someone you don’t know puts you down in public. It doesn’t happen often, but each time it cuts.

Learn from the blogosphere, they’ll tell you. It’s sound advice. Bloggers provide free feedback, bug reports, feature requests and publicity. We’d be nowhere without the blogosphere – it is our megaphone. The blogosphere is a truly democratic market of ideas – although hype can raise things to the top, the market has a way of regulating itself. Bloggers will drive people to your doorstep, it’s up to you to convert them to users.

People often compare the blogosphere to an “ocean” – a fitting comparison. Oceans can’t be tamed or controlled – they will take you wherever they wish. To that extent, you also never know what an ocean’s going to wash to the shore. Today, the ocean of the blogosphere washed up inspiration, inspiration like none I’ve encountered yet.

PostBubble is a new blog from ACS, a consulting firm, and Webreakstuff, a top design firm. PostBubble decided to cover ClaimID, and the review was like nothing I’ve read so far – the author truly comprehended the scope of the problem we’re facing, and trying to address with ClaimID. If you’re going to read one blog post about ClaimID, this is the one. Says the author:

Who needs normal? Normal is boring, normal is status quo, normal never gets the spotlight and normal is well, normal. But there is something else to be said about Normal. Normal means that everybody knows it, everybody uses it, and everybody has heard of it. Email is normal, searching on Google is normal, and driving a car to work is normal. When it comes to business, becoming normal is an objective.

I thought of all this when I was reading through the buzz on claimID and had the feeling that there were bees inside my skull. I saw the potential, I saw the value, and I saw the spark, but there was still something seriously wrong with my head and I couldn’t quite figure out what was missing from the picture. It finally dawned on me that all of this speculation and analysis was like trying to break down the meaning of life. ClaimID is one of those ideas that can’t be simply broken down because there is only one clear way to describe what they are going to do: claimID is going to become Normal.

…… Regardless of what they accomplish or how, it should be duly noted that claimID epitomizes the opportunity and excitement of the Web 2.0 world. Web 2.0 should not be copycat and should not be a blind rush towards what seems to be the next craze and market opportunity. Web 2.0 is not to stumble on a market void and backfill it with a half-baked product or service. Web 2.0 is to create something that nobody knows they need and that they won’t be able to live without. This is the real objective of Web 2.0 and when something like claimID comes out it should remind us all what we are really trying to accomplish.

The rest of the post is here. I’ve read it over and over and over. It feels so good when people get your ideas at such a fundamental level. So today, I found inspiration. Inspiration was washed up on my shores from the blogosphere, and it felt really good.

Postscript: I should note that inspiration has been coming frequently lately, and that’s a good thing. Celebrated designer Bryan Veloso also brightened our day last week, but Terrell beat me to the reply. Not content to rest on our laurels, last night we introduced a MicroID-based link verification service – something that will allow all ClaimID users to easily put verified claims on links. It marks a big step forward for our little company.

Noticed / Thoughts — No Comments
10
May 06

ClaimID on Inside the Net Podcast

I’m happy to report that ClaimID was featured on this week’s Inside the Net podcast. Hosts Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte gave Terrell and I a great opportunity to talk about claimID, the thinking behind it, our goals for the service – and a lot more. If you’ve wanted to know a little more about why we built ClaimID, I’d really recommend listening to the podcast. I think it shines a nice light on our motives and goals – we’re really trying to build a service that will be useful to you for the next 10, 20, 30 or more years. The identities we create on the net will only multiply – and the need for identity services like ClaimID will become more and more evident.

This summer, Terrell and I will both be working on ClaimID full time. This is a unique experience – we’ve always had “day jobs” as full time Ph.D. students and researchers. Thinking back to when ClaimID was first being incubated, I had a full-time job and was in school – it’s amazing anything got done. We plan to invest our time building a service that is really useful to you – we’ve got a number of really interesting ideas. The most important thing to note is that we’re just getting started. We’re at the beginning of a long journey as we build ClaimID into what it will become. Indeed, the future is bright.

Thoughts — No Comments
8
Mar 06

New Ways of Finding People

We’ve been watching the logs at ClaimID for the past few days, and we’ve been seeing the crawlers come by. Googlebot, Slurp, MSN and even Baidu: they’ve been hard at work, working for the people who’ve started claiming their identity on the web.

Crawling technology is highly proprietary; while we understand the central tennets on which link analysis systems are built, at the end of the day, crawlers are black boxes. That said, we always had a hunch that gluing the things that are about you together would be good crawler food, so we’re testing this hypothesis extensively.

I’m starting to like some of what I’m seeing. The first case is Lyceum chief software architect John Joseph Bachir. JJB was one of our earliest testers of claimID, and Google has had some time to chew on his page. Taking a look at a search for his name, I like what I see. However, a name like JJB’s is unique; so lets compare that against another case.

Paul Jones, director of Ibiblio and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, has a common name. Anyone who has met Paul will swear he is a most uncommon fellow, but the search engines don’t seem to care about that. Paul joined claimID in our beta, so Google has really only known about his page for a few days. A google search of Paul Jones reveals 127 million results, of which Paul Jones represents some. We always said that claimID doesn’t solve name disambiguation problems; that is a problem without a solution. ClaimID can help out another way, though.

Of those 127 million results, some of them are about Paul Jones. If you’re researching Paul, it is up to you and your deductive skill to figure out which ones of them are about the Paul you’re looking for. A daunting task, no? So lets change the search just a little bit.

Google: “Paul Jones” claimid

Now things are a little different. In the top ten results are Paul Jones claimID page. You browse to the page, look at Paul’s picture and bio, and realize this is the Paul Jones you’re looking for. Oh, and now you have 24 links with which you can start researching Paul, instead of 127 million. Paul has created a personal pathfinder for those interested in learning about him.

The interesting thing is that we can all do this. When you Google someone, you’re always going to be presented with millions of results, and it will always be a crapshoot to filter those results when you’re researching a person. When you modify a search by adding claimID, you’re going to be provided that person’s public pathfinder, the lens through which they wish to share themselves. Imagine how this could change things?

Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself, but I can’t help but think big. We built claimID to leverage existing tools and infrastructure; we’re interested in playing with everyone, rather than owning the game. If finding someone and the links about them becomes a matter of googling someone’s name plus claimid, rather than sifting through millions of results, I think we can have a profound impact on how people search for each other.

Software / Thoughts — 1 Comment
3
Mar 06

How to Beta: Lessons Learned

The claimID beta is a week old, and I already feel like I’ve learned so much from the experience. Watching a public beta is both frightening and exhilarating, especially when you’re creating a product as heavily user-centric as claimID. What have I learned? Here’s a little actionable list.

  1. Record, discuss and consider all user feedback. We do this by posting feedback messages to a wiki, and going through it point-by-point. Nothing is thrown out, everything is discussed. Yeah, its not really scalable, but if you’re running a private beta that has outgrown human-gardening ability, you’re probably not running a private beta. Embrace all the feedback with an open mind, and try and situate yourself in the user’s mindset; how they approach your software is always going to be different from what you envisioned.
  2. Understand the power of feedback. JJB told me that for everyone who provides feedback about a feature or problem, 100 people have thought it and not written in. The 100 figure is flexible – it could be 10 or 1000, but there’s something really powerful in this statement. The user who pipes up is speaking for more users than him or herself.
  3. Track and analyze all your datapoints. You can learn alot from your analytics. You can also learn alot from your beta invite requests. One of the things we’ve learned is that claimID has a much larger international audience than we could have ever imagined. This was a surprise, and we’ve modified our plans as a result.
  4. While we’re talking about plans, be prepared to change yours as well. User-centric design is more than a talking point; embrace and support the enterprising uses your users create. These enterprising users are the things people like – they may not have been on your original spec, but you’ve got to be OK with this. Please note, this is not an excuse for feature creep, but simply a call to be willing to adapt.
  5. Embrace those who talk about you, even those you don’t support you (or understand your concept). Noone is going to understand your product as completely as you, so you’ve just go to be OK with that. You don’t have to post comments to every blog post, but I’ve found that emailing thanks to bloggers lets them know you appreciate their efforts. When I blog about something, it takes effort – and to be thanked and know that you’re read, I like that. When people miss the concept, or malign you, comments give you a perfect place to explain your service with your vision. These public conversations are invaluable, and you can thank Doc, Dave, Chris and Rick for giving them a name.

Those are some things I’ve learned. Here are a few things I’m still working on:

  1. How to keep the users coming back. Things are loose and fast during beta, and changes are frequent. We’ve got a large stable of waiting invites, but we want our first and second generation users to come back to our service as we continue to make it better. Sure, we can blog about new releases, but there’s got to be a better way to get people to log back in.
  2. How to message better. We’ve got a crystal-clear vision in our heads, but once the pen hits the paper, things get confusing, and heaven knows how well it translates to other languages. We’re spending as much time coding as we are writing clean user documentation – I think if the users can clearly understand the vision of the service, it is completely fine for them to explain the service on their own terms.

It strikes me how this blog post could go on and on and on. I’ve learned so much, and have so much left to learn. That said, I’m guilty of blogging at extreme length too often, so I’ll probably just keep updating this thread as claimID evolves. And speaking of claimID, Terrell will be at SXSW interactive with 200 extra-cute claimID buttons to give out. If you’d like to chat about claimID, drop him a line at terrell at claimid dot com.

Noticed / Software / Thoughts — 1 Comment
24
Feb 06

claimID is live

A waypoint in a long journey has been reached. ClaimID, the service Terrell and I have been building for the last half-year, goes live in a public beta today. ClaimID is a service that allows people to manage their online identity. ClaimID is about letting everyone, from the internet superstars to the regular Joe, claim what is about them online. How our identity is represented in search is only going to become more important; claimID allows everyone to manage their online identities. Here’s mine. With claimID, I provide people a picture of my online identity, and I influence search engines to return more relevant results when people search for me. This only gets more important over time.

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.We believe that search engines have been having the final say about our identities for too long (have you looked yourself up in a search engine lately?). ClaimID lets you classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you, so that people who search for you are able to see the identity you want to present. It’s a really simple idea, and we’ve worked hard to build a system that is incredibly easy to use, so that just about everyone can benefit from claimID. (http://claimID.com/about)

I spend a lot of my time thinking about identity, how we construct it, and how we represent it. ClaimID is the result of a lot of this thinking. We want to start a new discussion about identity. We want to give people tools to manage their online identity. More than anything, though, we want to creatively help people. Our identity representation in search is a complex and emotional thing; claimID is a simple way for us to start addressing the isse.

Well, if you’ve made it this far, and you’re still interested, I’ve got a reward – a beta invite key. Copy and paste everything within the brackets [3e85ef0ad43c97048ed4f9b46e61bfc63315002c] and register at claimID. The catch is if you find any bugs, drop us a line at bugs@claimID.com. And if you like claimID, feel free to mention us on your blog or website.

Noticed — No Comments
13
Feb 06

claimID has a blog…and a beta

Yes! claimID now has a blog.

This week also marks the beginning of our verrrry private beta.

claimID is actually happening!

Software — 4 Comments
17
Jan 06

claimID – accepting addresses for invites

I’m really pleased to announce that we’ve more or less hit our development goals for claimID, and we’re going to be giving away invites to the service within the next two weeks. We’re closely heeding Michael Arrington’s instant classic of a column, Don’t Blow Your Beta. This means we’re taking extra time to test and test, refactor and refactor, and make sure every element in the UI just makes sense.

A number of you have asked me what claimID is, and in case you’re interested, here’s a little taste:

claimID is a service that lets people track, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about them online. We’ve all met someone who is annoyed, uncomfortable, or even generally nonplussed with the way their identity is represented in search. Search engines are good at finding exactly what people search for; the only problem is our identity is anything but exact. What if a person searches for you and doesn’t use the name you publish under, or they don’t know your maiden name? And what if there is actually really great stuff about you on the web that doesn’t have your name attached to it (like a news story about a project you worked on)? On top of that, how do people know which of the results are actually about you, and which are about the person or persons who share your name? Why do you have to lose out when someone searches for you (especially if the person searching for you is a potential employer, mate, or an opinionated family member)? There’s more of us appearing online each day, and there’s more stuff about us online than ever before. The reality is we need to be proactive about our online identities, we need to invest time in tracking and protecting them, and we need highly usable, accessible services like claimID to streamline the process.

That’s a taste of what we are – so now, what we aren’t. We’re not a verified identity service, we’ll leave that to openID and Sxip, and we’re not a wisdom-of-crowds or social recommender service like Opinity or iKarma. Our team is completely dedicated to solving the unique and very real problems people have with the information that is about them online. The reason we think this idea works is because we’ve made an accessible solution to an inaccessible problem. Look around you, poll the room to see who is truly comfortable with how their identity is represented in a search engine. Isn’t it time we started doing something about it?

As I previously stated, we’re getting quite close to the beta launch. If you’re interested, browse to claimID.com and leave us your address. We’ll be in touch. This is about to get fun.

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