Managing contacts with claimID

March 21, 2007 in OpenID by Carsten Pötter | 5 comments

claimIDThe fine folks at claimID have launched a new feature to their excellent service today: contacts. It sounds like as if it was nothing special at all but claimID is about to establish itself as the prototype service of online identity management.

Big words for sure. So let’s see what their implementation of contacts is about. If you are familiar with claimID already you can probably guess that it is based on OpenID. Everyone with an OpenID can add any claimID user as a contact by simply surfing to their claimID account. There’s a link to add that user as a contact: add contact You can also mark up the contact a little bit more by using XFN values:

contacts xfn

XFN is another implementation of microformats into claimID. User profiles are marked up as hCards already.

By now users can manage their various user profiles and other links relating to them, their OpenID’s, and their contacts which makes claimID rather unique. Though currently there is no way to add an external contact. claimID sends a message to the person you wish to add; that’s not possible outside of claimID (see the comments of the announcement for claimID’s reasons).

Hopefully there will be a way to add everyone with an OpenID as a contact regardless if they are registered with claimID or not. Would be awesome.

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  1. Fred’s avatar

    Fred on March 21, 2007 at 20:59

    Carsten, thanks for the kind words. We’re really excited to get this framework up and running - admittedly we’re at the beginning, but once we get it rock solid there’s amazing stuff we can build on top of it.

    And I agree we’ve got to figure out some way to make adding external contacts easier. I’m going to try and get that coded up in the next few hours. At least it will be a start.

    -Fred

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on March 21, 2007 at 21:13

    Fred, actually it’s a great start already. :) claimID is an intriguing example of what can be done with OpenID and microformats.

    Carsten

  4. Gaurav Kanoongo’s avatar

    Gaurav Kanoongo on May 20, 2007 at 05:35

    Dear Fred,

    Peoples generally have email addresses, and very few of them have OpenIDs, to make OpenID popular, I think it would be if claimID.com add features to import gmail, Yahoo contacts, to send bulk invitations, and some cool features from http://spock.com, http://yoname.com, http://wink.com, http://lizit.com, and http://upscoop.com.

    Regards,
    Gaurav Kanoongo

  5. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on May 20, 2007 at 18:42

    I think that’s not what claimID is trying to accomplish. The focus is more on OpenID, MicroID, and microformats, I think. I am not Fred, though. ;)