Brian Ellin of JanRain wrote up an awesome app running on AppEngine over the past week which lets you browse the web and "Demand OpenID". Really simple site which shows a running tally of the top sites (currently Twitter and Flickr) where people want to be able to login with OpenID. It includes a dead simple bookmarklet for you to add your demand as you're browsing around.

Marshall over on ReadWriteWeb wrote about it as well; Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action.

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.

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!

I thought being on Google News once in a lifetime was amazing, now twice!


Today is exactly one year and one day after the last time OpenID was on Google News because of the Microsoft announcement at RSA.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. This is really great news as it shows just how far OpenID has come since brad first announced it in 2005. Thanks to everyone who has worked with us over the past two and a half years to get OpenID to the point that it is!

I'll try to keep this list updated of people writing about it:

• O'Reilly Radar - OpenID Foundation - Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo


• ReadWriteWeb - OpenID News: Big Co's Put Money Where Their Mouths Are


• Dick Hardt - Industry Giants join OpenID Foundation Board


• VeriSign Innovation - OpenID Foundation: Does the world really need yet another identity organization?


• TechCrunch - OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM


• Mike Jones of Microsoft - Microsoft Joins the OpenID Foundation and its Board of Directors


• Mashable - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign Join OpenID Foundation


• TechCrunch UK - Google, Microsoft, Verisign and IBM join OpenID

At this point I'll just let TechMeme manage the list. :) http://www.techmeme.com/080207/p27#a080207p27

Favorite quote from CNET, "If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron."

Pretty cool map of the World given all the trips on Dopplr last year. They posted more stats on trips as well.

This morning two awesome things shipped:
- the Action Streams plugin for Movable Type
- Yahoo's OpenID Provider which you can see in action on Plaxo

You can read more about the Action Streams plugin on Six Apart news as well as a more technical post on MT.org. I'm extremely excited about it since for the first time in a few years my website isn't just a black page with a giant photo of me wearing sunglasses and a link to my blog. It was also really great working with the Movable Type team, especially Mark Paschal, on taking this plugin from a hackathon project to something we can all be extremely proud to ship!

I know I've said it before, but we're hiring people to do more cool stuff like this.

Just saw that Blogger's beta now is an OpenID Provider as well! Two providers in one day, awesome!
http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-feature-blogger-as-openid-provider.html

You have to create an account first (sweepstakes rules I'm guessing) but we can now add CNN to the list of OpenID supporters!

In other news, heading to Macworld later today. :)

At the Internet Identity Workshop again today, awesome to see the community just working!

Guys from Vidoop leading a conversation on OpenID privacy and security.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo leading a conversation on OpenID user experience.

OpenSocial - http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-a-n.html

Keep your eye on Six Apart News as well the next few days.

We're all still sitting in Tulsa tweaking it, but great new OpenID website designed by the guys at Vidoop. Lots of cleanup went into this and a bunch of different people worked to make this happen!

http://openid.net/

I'm at Digital ID World today in San Francisco and was told I had to attend a session titled "Advanced Identity Management in Telco environment: Challenges of multi-play Identity Convergence". Orange (the mobile provider) started talking about expiriments they've been doing around service usage registration.

They just announced that all France Telecom subscribers (~40-million -- the country is about 65-million people) now have an OpenID. AOL announced a similar project, making every AOL account an OpenID this past February.

This makes FT the first major telco to support OpenID! They're also talking about allowing access to Orange branded services with external accounts (hopefully OpenIDs). They just showed a draft screenshot of OpenID logins along with Google and Yahoo auth. Go to http://openid.orange.fr to learn more.

Awesome news and I hope to see others follow. I've always said telcos are in a great place to be identity providers.

and got an iPhone. Ended up with too many times this week where I needed internet or email during the day and didn't have (or want to pull out) my laptop. I've also been wanting a GSM phone since I no longer have one from work. So picked up an iPhone last night, ported my number, and just finished installing a bunch of stuff on it.

As Scott Kveton beat me to blogging about, grr power outages, last evening I won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source award along with Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Aaron Leventhal, and Paul Vixie. The award I won was for Best Strategist which refers to the work I've done over this past year at VeriSign within the wider OpenID community. Am certainly really honored to have been recognized though am guessing I now need to work on raising my hacker geek cred again. :P

In other news, Simon Willison and I gave a three-hour OpenID Bootcamp tutorial yesterday morning at OSCON. Slides can be found up at http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/openid-bootcamp-tutorial/. In the afternoon, Simon and I then joined Tim O'Reilly as a part of the Radar Executive Briefing and discussed OpenID with him, ending with a really great statement from Tim as he sees OpenID as one of the technologies to really pay attention to this year.

So very long but exciting day and already back to OSCON for more session today!

Via http://newsgland.blogspot.com/2007/07/37signals-openid-and-mac.html, it seems that URLs like http://openid.aol.com/recordond@mac.com work as OpenIDs.