For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it.
Now, the massive social network--once famous for its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience--announced Monday that it has become an OpenID "relying party," which basically means that it's started, at last, to deploy support for the standard. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.
But, Monday's announcement indicated, Facebook believes the two can work in tandem.
"We've always let our users express their real world connections," a post on the Facebook blog read. "From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook."
Most notably, you can now register for a Facebook account with your Gmail account, or can link an existing Facebook account with Gmail or other OpenID-participating services if they support automatic log-in.
"We've always believed that making the user experience as secure, lightweight, and intuitive as possible, which 200 million people can comfortably enjoy and understand, is one of our top priorities," the blog post read. That could be a subtle nod to the fact that OpenID, founded in 2005, has historically been a bit difficult for the non-tech-savvy to comprehend.
Facebook's blog post also said that security concerns have been an issue. In working with the OpenID community, "we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site."
The plus side? Facebook's tests have indicated that if new users can register with an existing Web service account, like Gmail, that they are more likely to stick around.
Twitter search results for 'Gmail.' Looks like we have an outage.
(Credit: Twitter)Well, this was something nice to wake up to on a Friday morning: No access to my Gmail account. I was greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" and the message, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." Ugh. Thanks, Google.
I went over to Twitter Search to see what other people were saying, and sure enough, a search for "gmail" produced plenty of complaints about outages, with hundreds more rolling in by the minute. Many of them, given the timing (it was about 6 a.m. Eastern time) appeared to be in Europe or Asia.
Some complained that other Google apps were down, too, but I could access the three that I use most often (Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader) just fine.
Gmail suffered an outage in February that was big enough for the company to apologize for it; that one, as well as a smaller one in March, took place when it was the middle of the night in the company's Bay Area headquarters. Perhaps this is Google's way of telling people on the East Coast to stop waking up so early.
I'm a free Gmail user, and I'm guessing that so are most of the twitterers airing their grievances. But for paying Gmail customers, Google promises 99.9 percent uptime, or it'll reimburse them to some degree.
Update (3:23 a.m. PT): About a half hour after I originally noticed that my account was down, it's back up (at least for now), but loading very slowly.
Update (4:48 a.m. PT): Google has issued a statement: "A number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail this morning. The problem was immediately investigated, and service was restored within 20 minutes. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard."
A look at new Gmail security features that let you know where else you're logged in.
(Credit: Google)Gmail users now have some extra ways to make sure no one can snoop around in their e-mail accounts, a post Monday afternoon on the Official Gmail Blog explained. The Google e-mail service provider is introducing a feature so that members can see where they're logged in and then opt to log out if they want.
The feature is currently rolling out to Gmail members using the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.
At the bottom of your Gmail window, you will now see if you're logged on in any other locations, the post by engineer Erwin D'Souza explained. You can then click through to find out the other IP addresses where you're logged in, and whether those locations are Web-based, on mobile devices, or elsewhere.
Finally, in the event that you see your ex's iPhone listed as one of the IP addresses, you can click a button to sign out all locations other than the one where you're currently clicking around on Gmail. Then it's time to think about whether it's creepy that you know the IP address of your ex's iPhone.
"If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers," D'Souza wrote. "I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder."
'Custom Time' in action. Darn, I wish I'd had this when I forgot to ask my boss for some days off.
(Credit: Google)Happy April Fools' Day!
As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.
"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I'm denying it."
April Fools' Day is something that the Gmail folks take very seriously--the product's real beta launch was, in fact, on April 1, 2004.
What, where's Bono and Project Red?
But the April Fools' Day shenanigans at Mountain View went well beyond Gmail. Google's home page provided a link to "Virgle," a faux collaboration on an "open-source" Mars expedition between the prank-friendly dot-com and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. "Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B," the site explained. "So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars."
The information about "Project Virgle" was accompanied by an application for interested "pioneers" and a video starring Page and Brin in which they look like they're having a lot of trouble keeping straight faces.
Other Google divisions joined in the April Fool's Day fun, too. The links to featured videos on YouTube's home page all directed to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 pop song "Never Gonna Give You Up," which became a geek-culture phenomenon over the past year as the "Rickrolling" prank.
Google Calendar, meanwhile, offered users a "Free Wake Up Kit" to help users get out of bed in the morning.
"The 'wake up' notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used," the fake announcement from Google read. "The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters."
An 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button on Google Calendar schedules random dates.
(Credit: Google)Google Calendar also added one of Google's famous "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons to its scheduling tool, creating random events on calendars that inevitably involved dates with celebrities. (Except I didn't really feel lucky. I was only offered "dates" with Tom Cruise, George W. Bush, and South Park's Eric Cartman. None of them are really my type.)
Last year, Google had to deal with "no, it's not a joke" rhetoric when a live snake escaped in the company's New York office on April Fools' Day and representatives had to ensure both employees and the press that there were no hijinks in place.
- prev
- 1
- next
