claimID is a pretty basic service that makes two major offerings. First of all, it supports the new OpenID standard based on the idea of having one login for many websites. When you register on claimID, you get your own OpenID URL which you can use on any other OpenID-supported website to login.

But the main feature of claimID is that it provides a place where you can keep track of all of your identities across the internet, and group them together. For example, on my claimID page, I have a group listing all of the Web 2.0 services that I’m a member of, with links to my profile on all those services. I also have a group that lists all of the blogs that I am a part of, a group that lists all the sites that I’ve designed, and all the forums that I’m a member of, and I’m considering adding a few more as well. When you add links to your claimID page, you can indicate whether or not they’re by you or someone else, and whether or not they’re about your or something/someone else, and of course, tag your links. claimID also allows you to verify that the links you add are yours by adding a provided meta tag to your website–this shows that you actually own your links. You can then share your claimID link with others so they can find all of your identities on the web, and then hook up with other claimID users for your Contacts. claimID also generates an hcard of your links.

claimID is a fairly simple but well-designed service for compiling all of your identities around the web, sharing them, and connecting them using OpenID. If you find yourself spread across the web using a number of different services and maintaining different websites, I highly encourage you to create a claimID page. Oh, and add me as a contact.
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Tags: contacts, hcard, identities, OpenID, review, services, Web 2.0

A couple of years ago, I got my first experience with Adium, when it was still in perpetual beta development. Maybe I had an unlucky download or something like that, but it gave me a broken app that froze when opening. Obviously, I got rid of that pretty quickly.

But now, fast forward to about 5 months ago. Not only had I spent the year to year and a half prior to last March searching for an effective system for my e-mail management and a good web browser (the web browser review will be up in 11 days), but I was also looking for something to provide a good alternative to iChat rather clunky interface. I had given a bit of attention to Fire and Proteus, which are both products that are similar to Adium 1.0.x’s feature set, but really didn’t give me enough bang for my buck, not that I had given them any bucks to begin with. (Coincidentally, nowadays development on Proteus has been moot, and the Fire developers have given up and moved over to the Adium project themselves!) I ended up settling with iChat and Chax for quite a few months, which was a fairly good setup.

However, around March, some different things started happening. I started to have some more of my friends give me their IM names, and they didn’t use AIM; opting instead for other clients, in particular Yahoo! IM. (Incidentally, my username over there is selppafoniatnuof, which is fountainofapples spelled backwards because all of my other names were taken by some numchuck imposter! It’s pronounced “sell-puh-phone-eee-at-new-uv”.) I’m not a really big fan of Yahoo!’s own IM client, nor was I a big fan of dealing separately with iChat and YIM. I was also getting more Jabber/Gtalk contacts, and really didn’t like dealing with the two separate lists that iChat has for AIM and Jabber. It was time to get another solution.
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Tags: chat, contacts, friends, iChat, IM, Mac, review, Software