OpenID Social Networking?

If you’re familiar with OpenID then ClaimID is a great place to start using it. I’ve mentioned ClaimID before, but if you’re not aware, it brands itself as the free, easy way to manage your online identity with OpenID . It’s a beutifully done interface complete with prototype Ajax magic, a well thought out interface and a very specific purpose (just managing links related to you). It’s one site that’s basically looking for new ways of using Microformats and open standards. For instance, they verify your webpages belong to you by checking for a MicroID meta tag in the header of your pages. Check the header of this page for an example — it’s a just a hash (sha1) of my email address and the URL. Basically the idea is that if you have a URL you can check if it’s owned by a given email address, but never get it from the hash. Very easy solution for a big web problem. They also have a little hcard, which they provide the little snippet to add wherever. The new feature, which is pretty slick, involves OpenID based contacts . Which 37 Signals new Highrise application, and the insane population of LinkedIn , managing contacts seems to be of some importance. To be honest I don’t understand the LinkedIn ferver; having a place to manage my address book would be much more beneficial. ClaimID takes a slightly different approach to this. In the same way you might have a list of email addresses you regularly contact, you’d have a list of OpenID identities. I’m not sure I see any instant functionality in this aside from organizing contacts, but it could later be equivalent to an email list with all the additional information available on their OpenID URL. I see a lot of possibilities for it, and ClaimID is breaking new ground with this new service.