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Jun
6
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I already touched on a neat feature of OpenID - you can have a plain old web page URI act as a proxy / alias for your openid. Well now the Sun OpenID IdP is up and running, I can test the theory.
Per the FAQ, you need to add a couple of lines to your web page - in the case of a Roller template this needs to be close to the outside of the HTML; in my case that's in the _decorator template.
OK, let's try it. First over to LiveJournal :
Click, over to the Sun IdP :
I type in my credentials and ...
Yes I do, and I'm in :
Yeah - it works !!
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May
21
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Eve Maler has the skinny on Sun's recent announcement to not assert any of its patents against anyone wanting to implement OpenID (1.1) technology. Technology that relies on the network effect require a zero-friction path to adoption - if other vendors follow suite - OpenID will be off to a good start.
I'm also amazed at the brevity of the full legal text - at first I thought I was missing a few pages - maybe this is a new benchmark.
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May
7
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Today, Sun announced one of the side-projects I've been involved in over the last couple of months. It's all good. And the service, when it gets rolled out, will be really interesting. The start of something big I think.
Honestly though - to me that isn't the most important thing. What I appreciate is that Sun is still the kind of place where you can get things done (important things that have an impact) and you can get them done without having to first ask for permission. Here's how it works - you find some people with similar interests (it often helps if they are a diverse group) do some planning, find some money (if needed) and go do it. Above all - don't ask for permission - that's not how Sun works.
Oh, it also helps if you're working with super smart people - the OpenID team at Sun has those in abundance.
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Apr
12
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One neat thing about OpenIDs is that they are represented by plain old URIs which means you can do neat things with them. For example delegation allows me to use my blog or homepage as my OpenID URI and delegate to a real OpenID; this is achieved by adding a couple of tags to my blog template to tell the Consumer (the OpenID enabled web site) how to resolve the real Identity Provider.
In Roller, you need to edit your decorator template (or whichever template has the HEAD section) and add :
Obviously - the URLs would depend on your Identity Provider. What this means is I only ever have to remember one URI, even if I change Identity Providers.
How cool is that ?
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Apr
10
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I think Tim O'Reilly has it wrong. His blogger's code of conduct, while well intentioned, is unworkable. What the web needs is a reputation system. And by reputation I mean the social evaluation of a person, group or entity. The Social Evaluation - that's the important bit.
Here's how it would work. If you want to be taken seriously, people need to know who you are; something like OpenID would be adequate for this. Strictly it doesn't really provide anyone with any level of trust that you are who you say you are - but that's OK; just knowing that you're the same entity that left comments on other sites, or contributed to a wikipedia article is enough. Next we need a way of recording a reputation against OpenIDs - people should be able to very simply score you on your level of insight, wit, general behavior, etc. on the web - this has been solved locally for ebay and slashdot; what we now need is some way to federate your reputation globally.
The need for anonymity can't be pushed aside in this system; there are very good reasons for allowing anonymity. Flaming people or competing products, pumping up your own views, etc. are not good uses of anonymity and unfortunately cast the use of Anonymity in a bad light. Like I said there are good reasons for anonymity to be maintained for those who really need it - I live in a country and work for an organization where I hope I'll never need to hide my opinion. But there are many circumstances where anonymity is required,
The idea of web-reputation is anything but new - ebay, slashdot, to name a few have been using it successfully for years to provide user-moderation; what's missing is some convenient standards for federating or compositing reputation. A couple of sites have been trying to just that - for example here's my Opinity page. Opinity is a service that allows me to have some control over my on line reputation and does some degree of reputation compositing; but it isn't perfect; and it isn't really widely enough used to be of much practical use (today).
Here's my prediction - as the web moves inevitably towards adopting user-centric identity; reputation (and federated reputation) won't be far behind.
What do you think ?
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Jan
23
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Via Alexis, I just read Eve's posting about how a bunch of like-minded individuals are exploring ways to converge OpenID and SAML / Liberty. Liberty is often seen as a bit "Enterprisey" but has solved some tough problems; OpenID has a more user-centric design center making it a pretty good fit for today's user-centric web. From my 50,000ft view I think something good will come from this collaboration.
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Jan
15
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According to the Mozilla wiki - the next major version of Firefox (due the end of this year) will support both OpenID and Microsoft's Cardspace. The wiki doesn't explain exactly how OpenID (or Cardspace) will be integrated or more importantly what the user experience will be - which is what I'm really interested in (as a user). It will be interesting to see if Mozilla support will increase the adoption of OpenID.
For me, Id. Management built in to the browser is a big deal and I'll probably be looking at some of the beta builds to see how it evolves. Getting the user-experience right will be important if Mozilla really want this to compete with Cardspace (which looks very slick, IMO).
