New Features - MicroID Support!

We’ve been rolling out a bunch of new features the past couple of weeks, with even more coming soon. Probably the most noticeable change is to your Wink profile page. First off, we feature your content from any feed associated with the links you’ve listed. So if you link to your blog, you’ll see the latest three posts, or you’ll see your photos from your flickr Photos page, or your latest twitters. Whatever you link to, if there’s a feed, we’ll feature the content. We do this so that visitors to your Wink profile can get the bigger picture of who you are. Tell your friends about your page, and they have a one stop jumping off point to all your stuff on the web.

You can also now move your links to the order you like, by either dragging and dropping them up or down or by bumping them up or down one space at a time. So you can put your links where you want.

Behind the scenes we’ve made profile page load faster too. The speed of our pages and overall site is one of the things we worry about most. So look for further improvements there as we grow.

The last feature I’ll mention, is the new ability to verify your pages and links. We feel that it’s important to make sure that people can prove they are who they say they are. It protects you and makes our search engine stronger. One of the problems with sites like ours is that they make assumptions about what is yours and what isn’t. We want you to have control over that and have the ability to demonstrate that by adding your own sites and ultimately verifying them through Wink.

We are using two approaches for verification. The first way provides you with the ability to quickly sign in to the account that you are going to add through Wink, such as a MySpace profile. We do not keep or do anything with your login or password, we just use this method to verify that you are adding a page that belongs to you. The second method of verification is  via a new open standard called MicroID. MicroID is a simple and easy verification system that more and more services are adopting. Last.fm, Ma.gnolia, Wink, ClaimID and others for example. Without getting too technical, these sites put some encrypted MicroID code in the header of their pages that includes your verified email address that you use for that account. When you verify the same email address with us and add one of your accounts from these services, we can run a check to that site to see if they match. We also provide you with your own MicroID code to place in other sites that you can control. So if you own a blog and can edit the template, you can get a MicroID issued from us and place it in the header of that site. Then when you claim that site, we can verify it as being yours. Whew… It’s really not that complicated, so don’t worry.

Wink fully supports the MicroID standard and we hope that other sites begin to do so as well. The more places there are for people to create and share content and information, the more important this will be.

So that’s about it. There are other things as well. If you like, check out our sweet new friend invite function. It’s really slick and a great way for you to spread the word about Wink. And build a Wink widget while your at it I’ll do a post on that next.

Thanks for all the support!

-beach from Wink

9 April 2007 | Wink | Comments