Next week down in Mountain View is another iteration of the Internet Identity Workshop. For those of you that don't know about it, IIW has been an event that has really helped to shape the user-centric identity community over the past few years. It is where I met people like Drummond Reed and Gabe Wachob which led to the creation of a richer form of discovery for OpenID (and OAuth) services. IIW is almost entirely run like a BarCamp with the majority of the time being scheduled by the people that show up. It really is the conference that helps get stuff done, so if you're in the Bay Area next week you should try to stop by.

http://iiw.idcommons.net/index.php/Iiw2008a

If you've seen me recently then you've seen how long my hair is; it is no longer. Thanks Mena, J.T., and Owen!

Next week Sun has offered to host an OpenIDDevCamp at their annual day-long CommunityOne developer conference the day before the start of JavaOne. More details are on the OpenID blog but it is Monday May 5th from 11am to 8pm at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You don't need to be registered for JavaOne to attend, the post on the OpenID blog contains a discount code which will get you in the door.

This isn't the first OpenIDDevCamp, back in January we hosted the first OpenIDDevCamp at Six Apart which was a great success. Unfortunately I'll be on an airplane to XTech, but if you'll be in town for JavaOne then definitely think about stopping by and meeting some of the great people in the OpenID community.

After an exhausting (two panels and a talk) Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I jumped on a red-eye last night to New York for PodCamp NYC 2. While Anil would normally be the one to attend, he's off having fun at ROFLCon instead.

I really enjoyed Web 2.0 Expo this time around, had a lot of fun on both of the panels and have heard good things about my talk on Open Platforms. Six Apart also had a booth this year which seemed to always be full of people wanting to talk to us and learn more about what we're doing!

I figure one of these days I'll write my thoughts on "data portability" as I keep getting quoted about 5% off from what I said.

Back in February we hosted the Social Graph Foo Camp up at O'Reilly's campus in Sebastopol. Scott Kveton, Sara Winge, and I organized it in a matter of weeks and had over 100 amazing people show up for the weekend. Sara has just announced that a series of video interviews are now online from campers. While I didn't end up making one, you can watch Scott's since he was my partner in crime.


You can also read some of the themes and thoughts from SG Foo which were published in O'Reilly's Release 2.0 newsletter.

The look on brad's face when you tell him one of the things you're working on is building a Facebook app is pretty priceless. Almost like a "why are you wasting your time, do something cool!" type of look. Believe me, when I first started looking at (what today is known as) Blog It, I had some of the same feelings.

That said, Marshall at ReadWriteWeb has hit some of the interesting points about what Blog It will start to allow. He talks about the social graph and Beacon, but I'll throw two more into the mix.

• The social graph: One of the problems with understanding relationships on the web today is that you're not really able to make connections with closed networks. Marc Canter, and others, have talked about this a lot in the past though never really coming up with a solution that someone like Facebook will ship. Nearly six months ago we added the ability for bloggers on TypePad, Vox, and then Movable Type with Action Streams to link to their profiles around the web and mark it up with XFN. Imagine an evolution of Blog It where after adding your Vox blog, it asks "Do you want to link to your Facebook profile from you Vox profile page?". We then could markup this link in a way which tells the Google Social Graph API (or anyone else) that the rel-me link is verified. All of a sudden, Facebook accounts start getting connected into the wider graph.
• Telling your friends: I started blogging with LiveJournal so have always been used to a social blogging environment. I didn't start using RSS readers until recently as my LiveJournal Friends Page was my RSS reader. I care about what my friends are doing and want to know when they're blogging. Blog It makes it easier for me to keep track of my friends whether I follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Imagine another evolution of like a "Auto-submit to Digg" box when posting from Blog It as well.
• APIs: I love APIs! Imagine Blog It as an API. If all of a sudden I could add SMS posting for every blogger no matter the blog platform they use via Blog It; that would be totally rad.

There are defiantly other cools things as well, but I think the main theme of being able to use Blog It to help make blogging better for everyone is a reason that I love working on it.

Just saw a Google Alert hit where ClickTime has released an update to their online timesheet software including QuickBooks integration and the ability to login using OpenID. I think this is yet another piece of the "OpenID is for small business" story which Chris Messina started to write about last year with Blinksale and 37Signals.

Now, how long before we really see providers like VeriSign, TrustBearer, and Vidoop really pushing their strong auth into the hands of people using OpenID? Or until we see Microsoft really bridge OpenID with CardSpace authentication on the Windows desktop?

A few hours ago we got Blog It powered by TypePad out the door after a few months worth of work. Figuring out what makes sense for Six Apart to provide as a Facebook app, polishing it, and getting a bunch of feedback from bloggers. I'm definitely glad to see it in production and a bunch of people writing nice things about it. Thanks again to Bryan, Jamison, Tiffany, and others at 6A who really worked to get Blog It done!

I think I might be a bit too young to get Caroline McCarthy's reference in Six Apart wrestles the social-media dragon, but a great article nonetheless! :)

While I certainly like using Facebook to keep up with what my friends from school are doing, I've never really found an app that I'd use on a daily basis. Hopefully Blog It continues to kick-start that trend of useful apps atop social networking platforms.

Or as I said in our press release (still feels a bit strange to be quoted in our own release):
"Blog It is one of the few applications that takes content created inside Facebook and makes it available for use outside Facebook," said Recordon. "Blog It users are able to update their personal blogs, business blogs, online journals, Facebook status, or Twitter or Pownce activity all from one central environment. This is a concrete step away from the silos and walled gardens of the past and toward the open web of the future."

When Google launched App Engine last night at Campfire One (more on Radar), I was thinking about building an app that bridged Google Accounts to OpenID. Simon Willison did this around a year ago for Yahoo! accounts using their BBAuth protocol.

The reason this would be so easy is that App Engine includes a Users API for Google Accounts authentication. This makes it really easy to authenticate a Google Account in any App Engine app. (Of course you can also use OpenID via the Python libraries.) Thus writing the glue between an OpenID Provider and a Google Account wouldn't actually be that hard. The end result would be that every Google Account also become an OpenID.

Turns out I was already beat to the punch: http://openid-provider.appspot.com/. Ryan Barrett, who is a member of the App Engine team, wrote the app along and writes more about it on his blog.

This now means that every AOL, Google, and Yahoo! account is also an OpenID! Obviously this OpenID Provider is probably more of a proof of concept than anything else, but it still is great to see.

Pat (dnab) is organizing a white water rafting trip in June. Would be awesome to fill two boats, we're about half way there. Anyone interested in joining? Should be sweet!

What: White Water Rafting!
Who: All participants should be strong, physically fit and able to swim--only paddle boats are used.
Where: Middle Fork American River, which is a day-trip filled with Class II-IV rapids and a few stretches of Class V.
When: June 21st
How much: $169+tax per individual, plus a $15/day fee to rent a wetsuit if you don't have one of your own. I don't imagine cost will be a major concern for anyone, but if it is, let me know, and we'll see what we can work out. Also if by some unlikely chance we get 11 or more people signed up we get a 15% discount, and the price drops to $143+tax.

Edit: Sounds like this trip is full, though Pat is also going on June 1st.

If you haven't seen it, Brian Oberkirch wrote a great post yesterday on how he sees long-term value and creativity being created in the realm of "data portability", "portable social networks", "social network interop", "an interoperable social ecosystem", or whatever you wish to call it. I certainly agree with him that the large PR wins of "<insert big company here> joins DataPortability!" aren't solely the type that will ultimately take the ecosystem to an entirely new level. Yes, they lead toward a growing ecosystem (or act as a validation of one) around decentralized social applications, but at the end of the day I completely agree when he says, "if you want to see the future of social network interop, watch smaller, more nimble and daring players". Ma.gnolia going OpenID only is a great example of this already happening.

So the debate ranges on in comments to Brian's post, I keep working on cool stuff at Six Apart to help do our part, and will keep working to push technologies like OpenID, OAuth, and Microformats toward more ubiquitous adoption. What I promise I won't do is to throw one of the communities, that I'm trying to help, under the bus as I work to move this entire ecosystem forward.

Chris Messina mentioned this to me yesterday as we're both up in Seattle for a Microsoft Technology Summit, but Ma.gnolia is now only accepting OpenIDs for new signups! This is also reflected in their login page which now defaults to OpenID and allows you to select from various OpenID Providers (including the "Yahoo! button") as well as a traditional username and password for existing users. Ma.gnolia was one of the earlier supporters of OpenID so I'm both excited and grateful that they're helping to push the technology and community to new bounds.

ReadWriteWeb writes more about this change and the reasoning behind it; simply that today OpenID users are better users. That said, it isn't yet fully clear all of the ways OpenID will be used.

There are at least a few ways that people have discussed using OpenID for spam control online and this is just one of them. Others are working on ways to use OpenID and FOAF (friend of a friend) together to fight spam. OpenID has also got potential to act as an anchor point for activity data portability. There are many possible uses beyond simple single-sign-on. That's just the easiest way to explain OpenID and the most clear value proposition today.

Carsten Potter also takes a look at this:

Anyway, what’s so interesting about a new sign in page, you may ask? Well, simply Ma.gnolia requires that users have a verified identity with another service already.

Obviously trust and reputation become really important, but that's where things like the Google Social Graph API give me some hope of seeing this happen -- even in a simple form -- sooner rather than later.

Last night Mike Arrington of TechCrunch gave me a call wanting to chat a bit about OpenID adoption when it comes to sites you can login to with your OpenID (aka Relying Parties in identity speak). The crux of his question to me was if the big companies are doing their share to contribute to the OpenID ecosystem or if they're rather taking more than they're giving -- in the form of good publicity -- by not also becoming relying parties. As he pointed out this morning in his post "Is OpenID Being Exploited By the Big Internet Companies?", with the exception of Blogger from Google, all four of the big internet companies are at best only acting as OpenID Providers. While I am very supportive and encouraged by the work AOL, Google, Microsoft, VeriSign, Yahoo!, and others have done with OpenID, I do agree that it is healthy to be skeptical around public promises to support a technology when after a year some of those companies haven't followed through.

What I think is missing in this conversation is to look at what these companies have done, beyond just increasing interest, engagement, and general adoption of OpenID. Peter Nixey of Clickpass talked about how we shouldn't, "underestimat[e] the impact that even the current announcements have made". One notion that I'm really excited about is how it is now reasonable for relying parties to assume that just about any user showing up to their site already has an OpenID from AOL, Yahoo!, or one of the other large services that provides OpenIDs. Yes, there are education and usability hurdles around getting "normal people" to understand (or just use) OpenID on a daily basis, but the efforts that Yahoo! and Clickpass are taking in making their Providers dead simple are truly encouraging!

As I mentioned to Mike last night, one of the things I love about OpenID is how it really lowers the barrier to entry around new innovations in the authentication space. Companies ranging from the likes of Vidoop who are trying to kill passwords to Microsoft who is trying to tie web authentications to the desktop with CardSpace are both able to just focus on what they're good at; not trying to get every site on the internet to support their specific technology. Rather, they can use OpenID as a building block -- an enabling technology -- to gain adoption and iterate quickly. This holds true to individuals as well who can build Providers even just for themselves, maybe with authentication tied to their hacked Linksys router in their home closet.

While Mike is true that the footprint of open source relying parties don't yet add up to any of the big companies, it is great even just seeing OpenID relying party libraries on every Mac that is running Leopard! These open source tools (django, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Movable Type, phpBB, Plone, Ruby on Rails, and WordPress.org to name a few) are providing the building blocks to power large communities and new services that wish to accept OpenID logins.

Mike, thanks for asking the hard questions and bringing this aspect of supporting OpenID back to the forefront of conversation!

This week I was finally really back home which was really nice, though it also meant that my week was incredibly hectic with lots of people to talk to and things to do. This weekend however, has been quite chill.

Friday my series of meetings led me back to Yahoo Brickhouse where I ended up grabbing drinks with the some of the login team as well as MyBlogLog. Was a great way to end a day of bouncing between meetings before heading over to FooBar at Six Apart. After FooBar a group of us went over to the Adaptive Path birthday party, saw a bunch of friends, and ate free tacos from the taco truck they had outside!

Mid-day Saturday, after going for a bike ride, Beau texted me about going up to Santa Rosa for some wine as Gary Vee, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferris, and Robert Scoble were borrowing a vineyard for the day. Beau ended up not going, but by around 5pm I was seeing loads of people heading up there from San Francisco. Threw out a "anybody want a ride?" tweet, picked up Chris, and drove the hour up to De Loach Vineyards; an amazing place out in the middle of nowhere in Sonoma. Scott Beale posted some pics and Gary taped a live episode of his show Wine Library TV while we were there (cell phone quality up on Qik). Had a great night, got back to SF around 4am, and my favorite wine of the evening is their Pinot Noir Green Valley 2006.

Rolled out of bed around noon today and then went over to Trish's for an Easter dinner (never done Easter dinner before) along with a bunch of others from the Belize crew.

Also, check out http://www.hangarmovie.com/. It's a short film directed by a friend from high-school about secret military bases, giant robots, and hidden gold and he did most of the CG using open source stuff!

If you don't want me to download your shows via a Torrent, then you should do one of the following:

1. Upload the episode on your own site within a few hours (I have no problem seeing your ads)
2. Upload the episode on Hulu.com within a few hours (I have no problem seeing their ads)
3. Put your shows back on iTunes and upload the episode within a few hours (I have no problem paying for your shows)

When the "right" options are harder (or in this case impossible) you're only encouraging more "wrong" downloading of your content. lame.

eTech and SXSW were definitly two of the hot places to announce new services. It started exactly a week ago where Tom Coates from Yahoo! Brickhouse birthed a Fire Eagle which is a location service. I'm really interested in Fire Eagle because of how simple it really is. Some applications update your location (like Dopplr does for me) and then you can grant access to other applications to lookup your location.



This morning Ben announced the plugin he wrote for Movable Type which integrates Fire Eagle. This all started last week during a hackathon where Ben wrote the majority of the plugin (giving authors a concept of "current location") and then Mark and I added support for Action Streams to the plugin a few days ago. I'm excited and hoping to see more apps integrate with Fire Eagle.

ClickPass also launched while at SXSW a few days ago with the goal of making OpenID dead simple for an average user. I've known Peter for awhile now and he originally showed Scott and I a demo of it last OSCON. While a debate rages on about "customized login buttons", I'm glad for how much effort the ClickPass team has put into making OpenID simple to use. It may not end up being the perfect solution, but it really is a nice step forward toward mass usage of OpenID.

socialthing! was another service launched at SXSW which I had also played with a few months ago. TechCrunch has a really nice writeup so I won't really go into more detail. My one beef is that it asks me for my passwords when I'm adding a new service since it wants to be able to interact with APIs on my behalf. I know it's coming, but I'd love to see a way to use it just to read lifestream content and not have to fork over my passwords from the beginning. OAuth will also be really useful to solve this problem!

Well, after being on the road for nearly a month, I'm now back in San Francisco for the next few weeks. I started out with a vacation in Belize for the third year in a row along with a bunch of friends. Didn't dive as much as previous years, but really enjoyed the trip, others learned to dive, and it was quite relaxing. From there I took a red-eye back to San Francisco to attend Collective Intelligence FooCamp down at Google Friday and Saturday. It certainly was interesting, though much more focused within academia which provided a different view than most of the events I'm at. It might be cheesy to say my favorite conversations and sessions (including one on net neutrality) were with Larry Page, but it really was true; he definitely is smart and knows what he is talking about! From there I took off to Tokyo on Monday to spend some time in the Six Apart Japan office and announce the formation of a Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation. I think Tokyo and London are my two favorite cities outside of the US.

From Tokyo I had a day back in San Francisco, dropped some Tokyo Bananas off at the office, and then flew down to San Diego along with Anil. Monday I spoke on a panel at Graphing Social Patterns about feeds within social networking. I then stuck around for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference which I had never been to in the past. There were definitely interesting sessions and the conference was an energizing mix of alpha geeks (toting Asus Eee PCs) with business people enamored with new and major technological shifts. Tom Coates launched Yahoo! Fire Eagle (a location service supporting OAuth), Larry Lessig talked about political change, Nathan Eagle on interesting trends in how people relate online and data extracted from their interactions, and the list goes on with talks around mobile games, human-computer interfaces, and other interesting stuff.

Friday, Anil and I hopped over to Austin for SXSW. My flight ended up being one of the "nerd flights" as it started in San Francisco, picked a whole group of us up in San Diego, and then ended up in Austin. All in all, probably a dozen or so people on the flight that I knew. I had never been to SXSW before, so it definitely was an interesting experience. I spoke yesterday on two panels, A Critical Look at OpenID in the morning and then Portable Social Networks in the afternoon. Had a really great time on both panels and judging from reactions afterwards in person, via Twitter, and through blogs both of the panels went extremely well! I remember someone describing SXSW to me as "Most conferences the geeks try to blend into the business people, at SXSW the business people adapt to be geeks."

Just landed in Denver, have an hour before Blaine Cook and I continue on to SF, and am glad that I'll be back home for a few weeks. Will be down in Mountain View tomorrow speaking at the Emerging Communications conference, if you're around you should check it out as they've put together a great group of speakers!

This past Monday, Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Ian Kennedy (MyBlogLog), Kevin Marks (Google) and I spoke about the role of feeds in social networking. We talked both about some of the technical aspects of RSS and Atom feeds (such as the endless re-feed problem) as well as feeds from a feature perspective such as the Facebook News Feed, Six Apart's Movable Type Action Streams, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, etc. We also touched on some issues of data portability, ownership, and privacy.


I think we were a pretty lively panel, bantering back and forth a bit, and I really had a lot of fun. Thanks Sean Ammirati (mSpoke and ReadWriteWeb) for moderating and Yahoo Developer Networks for shooting the video!

Pretty cool and based on Atom to fetch, update, and delete contacts in your Google address book. A few hour countdown until Plaxo is supporting it? ;) :P
http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-2-1-contact-api-has-landed.html