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.
Birmingham City University, a college in the U.K., will start offering a degree in social media, the Telegraph is reporting. According to the report, the course will delve into "what people can do on Facebook and Twitter." The course will also help students learn more about blogs, podcasts, and other social activities. Upon successful completion of the course, students will earn a master's degree in social media.
Venture capitalist firm Charles River Ventures announced Monday that its partners have raised $320 million for its 14th fund, Charles River Partnership XIV. The company will use that funding to continue to invest in start-ups. Right now, it has investments in Twitter and Yammer, to name a few.
Social network Kickapps announced Monday that it will now support Facebook Connect and OpenID. Kickapps-powered sites don't necessarily need to include access to OpenID or Facebook Connect, but the option is being made available to all Kickapps clients. According to the company, information from a user's MySpace or Facebook accounts will be imported into their KickApps profile automatically. Sites that deploy OpenID and Facebook Connect will no longer require a unique Kickapps login.
Ecomii.com, a site that offers visitors green lifestyle information, launched a redesigned site Monday that provides users with more information about "living a healthier, greener life." The site features an enhanced navigation system to find information sooner. Its new gardening center helps visitors with landscape design and growing organic vegetables. The site also boasts a hybrid and electric car section, as well as a news center so visitors can be kept abreast of environmental news. The new site design is live now.
Truphone, a provider of VoIP solutions, unveiled a new calling plan Monday that will charge customers a flat monthly fee to call mobile phones or landlines. Dubbed TruUnlimited, the calling plan allows users to call anyone anywhere in the world for the same fee at any time in the day. Truphone is making the calling plans available now. It will cost about $14 per month to call landlines and $35 per month to call mobile phones.
While we're not yet about to see Facebook let people log on to its site with their MySpace ID, or vice versa, we are starting to see more cooperation among sites. MySpace ID product lead Max Engel speaks with Larry Magid about MySpace's efforts, including collaboration with AOL.
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Google announced Friday that AdSense users will now be able to change the font face of the text in its ad units. According to the company's AdSense engineers, users will be able to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana in their ads, but they will only be applied to units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.
To customize the ad units, AdSense users will need to visit the "Ad Display Preference" section in their Account settings and select the custom font they want to use for their ad. Once they pick that font, they can update their account and all of their ads will immediately change, as soon as the updated code is copied to their site.
Online app developer Zugara announced Thursday that it has released a new Twitter app called "Free Twitter Designer," which allows users to create "professional-looking" background images for their Twitter profile. The new app is available now for free on the company's site.
Popular rock band U2 launched its new album on MySpace Music Friday. The album, "No Lone On the Horizon," will be available exclusively on the band's MySpace profile page until March 3, at which time it will be released on iTunes and CD. The songs can only be streamed and they cannot be purchased through MySpace Music's download partner, Amazon. I can't help but wonder if this is a response to Thursday's report suggesting the album has cropped up on numerous P2P sites around the Web.
The OpenID Foundation, an organization that attempts to promote and enable OpenID technologies across the Web, has hired a new executive director. According to the organization, Don Thibeau, who was an independent consultant prior to his new role, has taken the reins.
ProPay, a provider of merchant payment solutions and PayPal competitor, announced Friday that it has launched ProtectPay, an encrypted payment card processing and transmission service that it hopes will provide an "end-to-end secure option for processing credit card payments in real time." The tool is available now on all ProPay accounts.
Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.
This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in its nature.
Engineer Luke Shepard will be Facebook's representative on the OpenID Foundation board, a corresponding post on the OpenID blog explained, adding that Shepard has been "a huge internal advocate for OpenID" at Facebook. The board also consists of members from Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign, and Yahoo as well as seven elected "community" members. Many of the corporate board members joined about a year ago; OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick is now employed by Google and has helped to build its OpenSocial developer platform standard.
"Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID's usability and reach," the post by David Recordon and Chris Messina read.
Facebook's blog post, written by engineering VP Mike Schroepfer, expressed similar goals. "It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web," Schroepfer wrote.
Facebook made a significant portion of its developer platform code open-source last summer.
The OpenID Foundation announced Wednesday that it has added PayPal as a corporate member of the board. Andrew Nash, PayPal's senior director of information risk management, joins the board, which is populated by representatives from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, among others. According to Nash, PayPal elected to become part of the OpenID board because "open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure" and his company believes it can add to OpenID's desire to bring more security to the Web.
HealthCentral, a site that provides a collection of condition-specific consumer health information, announced that it has acquired Wellsphere, a health technology company, that aims at informing the public on specific health issues. According to the company, the acquisition will create a combined entity that has 10 million unique visitors per month and creates "the largest organic aggregation of online health and wellness communities." The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CoveritLive, a company that offers a free hosted live blogging platform, announced that it has received $1.2 million in funding from Flagstone Capital to help it increase its customer base and improve its business model. According to the company, Flagstone Capital's commitment will provide support to the company until it can break even.
Bemba Media, a company that offered a bookmarklet that allowed users to bookmark pages across the Web and share them with others, announced Wednesday that it will shut down on February 8. According to a post on the company's site, the company's founders were forced to shutter their business "because the amount of Bemba users is not growing fast enough to pay" its expenses.
Radar, a photo-sharing site that allows users to upload pictures and connect with others, has launched an iPhone app. Users can take pictures with their iPhone camera and immediately upload those to their Radar page. That page can be kept public or private and other users can comment on pictures or send private messages to each other. The tool features basic editing tools for those who want to fix photos and a statistics page to see how many people have looked at the pictures. The app is free and available now in the iPhone App Store.
With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?
The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.
But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability--a single log-in across multiple sites--made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.
Hardly. But Wired's Michael Calore hit the nail on the head on Monday: "Presenting a dialog that asks a user to log in to one Web site using a name and password from another Web site is jarring, but Facebook has managed to keep Facebook Connect simple enough for everyday users to understand. Such ease of use virtually guarantees it will win support quickly."
The truth is, the future of the "social Web" is in expansion. And expansion invariably involves dealing with a crowd beyond the Twittering, FriendFeeding, WordPressing geeks who actually understand the concept behind data portability.
And that's not made any easier by the fact that OpenID calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." Try bringing that up in the boardroom of a non-tech company looking to ride the social-networking wave. Then tell them that the most buzzed-about social network on the planet will power your site's social features. The decision will probably fall in the Facebook camp, unfortunately for the open-standards crowd and its admirable dedication to all things balanced and democratic.
"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this," Fitzpatrick has said about OpenID. "The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community."
But your average company is probably going to care more about profit margins than OpenID's decentralized ideal, and the possibility of having its user activity broadcast across Facebook members' news feeds is tantalizing. Especially during tough financial times, strategy will likely trump idealism.
That said, there are some good signs for OpenID. It has a ton of support in the tech world, and if Facebook Connect's impending expansion goes awry for any reason--think Beacon--it could open up a whole new set of doors for OpenID. What it (and other open Web standards) needs either way is some image repair.
"Facebook is trying to replace all log-ins with their own, and control the creation, distribution, and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform," Chris Saad, whose DataPortability Workgroup has put its support behind OpenID and other open Web standards, wrote in a blog post. "The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative."
OpenID and its brethren could use a good, simplified marketing pitch, not to mention some announcements and partnerships that are more prominent than an extension for a niche Web browser. They need to use the resources that the likes of MySpace and Yahoo can provide to get more deals going and start making headlines outside of ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.
And most importantly, in a recession, "it's good for the Web, so it's good for everyone" just isn't concrete enough. One last tip for OpenID: Start talking business benefits.
There's a new OpenID extension for "social browser" Flock, and it was created with the help of password management service Vidoop and News Corp.-owned social network MySpace.
It's now available for download for all Flock users who have upgraded to Flock 2.0. For MySpace, which initially announced its support for OpenID back in July, this is also a push for Data Availability, a universal-login project that the social network announced in May but has since only rolled out with a few partners.
Yahoo, one of MySpace's launch partners for Data Availability, has also thrown its weight behind OpenID.
"As three companies dedicated to empowering users to easily share content and experiences, this was a very rewarding--and relatively fast--collaboration," Max Engel, MySpace's Data Availability product manager, said in a release. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web so that people can focus on their connections and the incredible content that's out there. This Flock extension will give millions of people an easier way to expand their experiences and expression without boundaries."
The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one's got the seal of approval from some big names.
There are deeper reasons for MySpace being so vocal about OpenID support, though. The standard has seen its toughest rival yet in the form of Facebook Connect, a data-portability project which enjoyed a high-profile New York Times writeup this week and will reportedly be ready for a full debut very soon. (It's already been implemented on a number of sites.)
Flock, unfortunately, isn't an enormous player in the browser space. It has tons of bells and whistles, but is still well behind the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of downloads, and has newfound competition from Google's Chrome.
Regardless, MySpace has been paying a lot of lip service to open standards recently, and it's always good to see real developments.
On Wednesday Google formally announced its support as a provider for the OpenID 2.0 protocol, offering some site owners a way to let users log-in and register for new accounts using existing Google account information. More importantly, Google will be letting these same users manage all their linked account information in one central location.
This new log-in offering is not available to all site owners just yet. Google has set up a sign-up form where developers can apply with their URL and OpenID identification to get access. Plaxo and Zoho are two of the first sites to already have the new system in place, with Zoho having offered a similar option since mid-April.
As many have already noted this isn't OpenID proper. Microsoft's usage of OpenID, announced on Tuesday at PDC, will let users simply drop in their special OpenID URL as their identifier, forsaking the need for a Google account. Google's foray into this is strictly as a provider, adding extra value for those who register for a Google account, while keeping users with OpenIDs from other providers out.
Google's OpenID implementation doesn't just give sites your OpenID identifier, instead it acts as a bit of a middleman, authorizing you through it before it hands it over.
(Credit: Google Inc.)OpenID enthusiasts shouldn't fret though. Just because Google isn't opening up its own sites to OpenID log-ins from others doesn't mean it's not around the corner. Google's Eric Sachs notes that the company is working to try and combine OpenID and identity management service OAuth, which means there's still work to be done on the personal information front. Google is unlikely to jump into being a service provider for OpenID until this is squared away.
MySpace today is announcing support for the OpenID identify platform. This means users of services that let you log in to them with OpenID will be able to use their MySpace credentials for the login. As TechCrunch pointed out, though, this appears to be a "land grab for user identities," since MySpace isn't allowing users to log in to MySpace with an OpenID account from another identity provider.
Jim Benedetto, MySpace VP Technology, says that he is not opposed to letting users login to MySpace from other OpenID parties. The current initiative, he says, "is step one." "We're looking at down the road becoming the relying party," (a site that recognizes other OpenID logins) he said.
All MySpace users will, by default, get OpenIDs when the project is turned on at some point in the near future. If they don't use the OpenID login from other sites, they will not notice any changes to their MySpace login experience.
The company is also announcing today that two implementations of its Data Availability program are going live. It's showing how profile data from MySpace can be imported into user accounts in Eventful and Flixter.
Data Availability is a powerful concept. It makes it possible to take your profile page and your social network created in MySpace, and push them into another service. Like MySpace's OpenID initiative, this project is part of MySpace's plan to become a hub of identity.
MySpace's Data Availability program allows other sites to import MySpace profiles. Eventful shown here.
(Credit: MySpace)While these initiatives are powerful and important for MySpace, and are good for users, neither implementation is, yet, fully open, since they're both one way. As I said, MySpace is not yet allowing users to login to the service with OpenIDs obtained elsewhere, nor is it allowing Data Availability partners to write data into MySpace profiles. Benedetto told me, "It would be very beneficial to us to have data coming in," but that the company needs to take a phased approach to supporting data sharing. "We're stepping in to uncharted territory," he said. Previous sharing projects in the industry have failed, he said.
In the future, Benedetto says, the OpenID and Data Availability projects will merge. Users will be able to use their MySpace OpenID to access their profile and network, "even when they are not on MySpace." Supporting OpenId will allow users to "login to the long tail of the Internet" via MySpace. Data Availability could make their profiles ubiquitous.
Full and open synchronization with other identify platforms and social networks would be much more complex than the current initiatives, and would likely confuse users at first, but ultimately this is what users are going to want: Truly portable social network data. It's the only way users can end up owning their online identities.
