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.
Posted at 04:59 PM in fun, identity, openid, products | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A neat feature
of the OpenID technology is that it allows you, the developer, to verify that the
user indeed has ownership of a URL endpoint. I had stated earlier that lifestreaming
services are going to find this feature very useful. Services like FriendFeed,
Plaxo Pulse (and of course, MyBlogLog) can enable users to verify ownership of their
various online identities/profiles, thereby promoting more authentic activity
feeds and eliminating the impersonation scenarios that will inevitably come up.
More generally, once a user has proved to your service that he owns a particular URL endpoint using OpenID,
interesting things can follow. Your service could retrieve (you should do this under user
consent and control, of course) user attributes that lie at the verified URL
endpoint. The retrieval is significantly easier if the attributes are marked
up with the appropriate microformats. I am sure people will come up with many interesting features by combining this simple, yet powerful, capability with technologies
like YADIS, FOAF/XFN, MicroID.
To set your MyBlogLog profile URL as your OpenID identifier, start here (requires logged-in state).
Posted at 02:49 PM in identity, openid, openness, yahoo | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
SG Foo Camp 2008 was useful and fun - much like other un-conferences such as IIW. Scott Kveton has a good summary here.
Here are the three things I found most interesting/relevant/useful/cool:
1. Social graph API - Brad Fitzpatrick introduced the Social Graph API on Saturday morning. Check out the resources on the Google code page to learn more about it. My view is that this seems to be going in the right direction thus far, though I'd definitely like to see the rel="me" claims getting verified via OpenID. I'd also like to see applications access non-public friend markups via OAuth.
2. Open Activity Streams - David Recordon led a session on the recent MovableType Action Streams release. I predict that Activity streams (or social event aggregation) will be the next big area for innovation in 2008. The idea is simple - I should be able to view (and eventually, create) all events that are relevant to me in a single place, instead of having to navigate to each and every social network/web application I use. Similarly, my friends should be able to remain updated on my activities across the internet - things that are already visible to them, albeit not without significant work today. I'd like to see standards emerge here around the messaging protocol, data formats, and authentication/authorization mechanisms. Good news is that the open standards on which this could be based already exist - its just a matter of combining what we have in a way that makes the web a more interesting and useful place to be in. See this and this if you want to learn more about Activity Streams.
3. Doing something useful with the OpenID URL - Late on Saturday night, I led a session titled "What can I do with the OpenID URL?" A bunch of us got together to talk about how we'd like to see the OpenID URL used to provide more useful services - both as end users of these technologies and as the people responsible for these products in our respective organizations. To start with, we discussed how having a useful profile on the OpenID URL endpoint would be valuable. We then discussed the potential use of the OpenID URL as an endpoint for permissioned messaging. Imagine that OpenID Relying Parties can contact the user by using the OpenID URL - which the user has proved ownership of - this brings the user back in control of communications - he can turn it off at any time, direct it to his voicemail (text to speech) between 12 pm and 3 pm, etc. etc. We then discussed the general use of the OpenID URL as a service endpoint (or more appropriately, a service discovery endpoint). Heres a picture from this session.
Brian Ellin ran a good session on improving the OpenID login experience. I was also glad to hear that our efforts around making the OpenID login experience easier (by allowing users to simply click a button to login with OpenID or to type in yahoo.com in the OpenID textbox) were generally welcomed by the folks present there. Theres nothing like direct user feedback - and its even better when its so positive!
All in all, this was a weekend well spent - its always enjoyable to meet so many folks committed to making the web a more fun and useful place. Many thanks to Scott, David, Tim O'Reilly, and all others who helped make this event happen.
Posted at 01:18 AM in openid, openness, sgfoo2008, un-conferences, workshops | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
This morning, the OpenID Foundation announced that Yahoo!, along with Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Verisign, will be joining as board members to help further the marketing, user experience, and adoption efforts around OpenID.
This follows closely on the heels of our product launch last week.
Hasn't this been a great year thus far?!
Related coverage:
Techcrunch
PC Magazine
New York Times
Artur Bergman on the O'Reilly Radar
CNET - Clarification: Unlike what this post suggests, I am *not* the Yahoo! representative on the OpenID Foundation board
Ars Technica
Posted at 11:47 AM in openid, openness, yahoo | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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
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.
Posted at 12:23 AM in openid, openness, products, yahoo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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:
Scott Kveton's guest post on Yodel Anecdotal - the official Yahoo! blog
Posted at 11:38 PM in openid, products, yahoo | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
