Chris Messina reported recently that some Highrise users attempting to use OpenID have hit problems. I’m sorry to hear that, while being glad to report that I’ve had no problems using the OpenID I have at claimID to access Highrise.
Chris also reported that claimID has added social networking. My initial reaction was that there are enough social networks on the web already, that I’d like said networks to accept my OpenID, but that I don’t need my OpenID producer to do provide yet another social network.
Fred Stutzman, posting about claimID’s decision to add a very lightweight feature that enables you to add contacts in ClaimID, pointed out that identity is social. That’s true, and it’s the reason my LinkedIn profile is one of the links on my claimID. I don’t think that it’s a good reason for claimID itself to try to become LinkedID.
I think LinkedIn is more about professional networking than personal relationships… which is a space that ClaimID is closer to… ClaimID also forces your contacts to have OpenID — making those connections essentially verified.
While I agree that we don’t need another social network, we do still need a portable directory of our contacts so that it’s easier to find, share and interact with our friends when we explore and join new *functional* social networks.
And we don’t want to be LinkedIN 🙂 The real power comes when we start tying identities together between sites, which is something OpenID allows and ClaimID is prototyping. Our contacts feature is mostly a proof-of-concept to test the scalability of OpenID-based person networks…we’ve got some really cool ideas for what we can build on top of it.
Chris and Fred,
Thanks for the comments. I will play around with LinkedID, or claimLink, or whatever name seems to stick for the claimID social stuff. Perhaps then I’ll see why this is significantly more than just another social net.