No Batteries Included - Shreyas Doshi's blog

A little bit about work

Since I joined Google, many folks have asked me what product I work on. If you are one of those folks, you probably got a vague reply from me. Also, thanks to that reply, I am probably not getting invited to the next party at your house. 

So I am quite glad that we recently announced the product that I am working on (the New AdWords Interface), along with a wonderful team of PMs, engineers, designers, and several other Googlers. 

Of all the things that I find exciting about building products, the most exciting has to be when you take the product to a very large number of users and get their reaction - hence, these are exciting times..

Who needs online password managers or OpenID when we have this?

Picked up this 'ultimate web solution' at the Container Store today. $8.45 solves all your password woes. I will never forget another password again.

More seriously though, from having seen numerous people use login, registration, and forgotten password flows in usability sessions, I can see how many people will actually use this. 

Now, the only remaning challenge is to remember where you have kept this diary. 

And so it begins - public beta of the Yahoo! OpenID service

The last 48 hours have been incredibly busy - as we had previously promised, we launched the Yahoo! OpenID Provider service (official blog post) on January 30. Actually, we had quietly launched it one day earlier. ;-)

Mashable has early comments on our implementation

Johannes thinks that this is Day 1 of OpenID being viable for business

Kim Cameron congratulates us

For me, this has been an incredible journey, starting with my first Internet Identity Workshop, to understanding the OpenID 1.1 spec, to thinking through the business case for the project, to working with the community to help fix the security issues my buddy Allen Tom had found in the OpenID 2.0 draft spec, to seeing OpenID 2.0 get finalized, to helping finalize the OpenID Intellectual Property Policy, to watching our product grow over the past few months - and countless other fun things (though they may not have seemed fun at the time) that came up along the way.

In addition to the folks we mentioned in our official blog post, many other people have helped make this happen - so I'd like thank everyone that has provided input, given direction, rallied support, or has been plain excited about what we have been working on. You know who you are!

Time to get some sleep now - 12:21 am.

 

The iPhone has been activated!

It wasn't half as bad as I thought it would be. After getting to the AT&T emergency service phone line (the number is 1-866-801-3600 in case you're experiencing activation woes), my phone was activated by the customer service rep in less than 5 minutes. She asked me to turn it off and turn it back on. That was it.

Its going to be a fun evening...

Purchased an iPhone - finally - waiting for activation

Okay - so I finally got an iPhone - the moment my 1-year contract with T-Mobile expired.. Rushed back home so I could activate it (for the 5 remaining people who don't already have the iPhone, you activate it from iTunes - I know, weird - good strategy on Apple's part as it provides further distribution for the iTunes application which in turn will translate to more music and content purchased on the iTunes store - but I digress..). Note that you cannot do anything with your iPhone unless its activated. Anyway, they asked me for some information (billing address, existing mobile number since I was using number portability to keep my 7 year old number from Irvine, etc.), which took about 10 minutes and then I was greeted with this message:

Your activation requires additional time to complete.

Obviously, this took me from being very :-) to very :-(
3 hours have elapsed since then (feels like 12 hours though - I don't remember ever being this excited about a product) and still no luck. On the phone with AT&T right now. Tried a few different departments and I think I have the correct one now (the AT&T "emergency service" department for wireless phones). Obviously, this IS an emergency! Maybe I will get lucky.

Yahoo! announces OpenID support!

Earlier this morning, we announced that Yahoo! will become an OpenID Provider - thereby allowing our 200+ million users to sign in to any Relying Party web site that supports the OpenID 2.0 technology. As Jeremy Zawodny points out, its great to be finally be able to talk about it openly - though if we've run into each other at any of the recent IIWs, you probably suspected this was coming soon.

I am obviously excited about what our foray into OpenID means for our users, for the OpenID technology, and for the web in general. Our public (beta) product launch is coming up pretty soon and we are looking forward to getting lots of good input from the OpenID community and from our users.  Stay tuned for much more...

Update - related posts:

Techcrunch

Scott Kveton's guest post on Yodel Anecdotal - the official Yahoo! blog

CNET

Cybernet

Financial Times

The Motley Fool

ReadWriteWeb

San Francisco Chronicle

Wired

Nice Yelp feature

I recently noticed that Yelp prominently features the first reviewer of a business in the main module for the business' listing like this:

A simple feature that encourages users to write reviews for businesses that haven't yet been reviewed... Nice.