Category: Web building

ClaimID makes the OpenID connection

ClaimID gets OpenID

I have to say that it’s things like this that really make me shiver with excitement…

I mean, it’s pretty simple, but it’s also pretty important.

What’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, it’s yet another site adopting OpenID, a decentralized identity system. And, as more and more sites adopt this system (which should remain transparent to end-users if they don’t want an OpenID), we near ever-closer to a lightweight, single sign-on solution.

To be sure, OpenID isn’t a panacea. It’s not intended to be one. The primary attractiveness of OpenID is its simplicity: it’s decoupled the issue of trust from identity and simply offers a way of staking your identity to a given URL. In a sense, if you can trust the credentials of Website X, then you (as a web service provider) can trust accounts created on that domain as well. The benefit for the account holder is that they don’t have to re-register on Website Y.

Note that this is a web-centric solution and doesn’t carry well into the real world where people don’t identify themselves by URLs (hmm, what if instead of a social security number, we were assigned a URL at birth? whoa.).

The other thing that’s great about this announcement is that it’s the work of Scott Kveton’s new startup, JanRain. I brought Scott and Terrell Russell together some time ago, so it’s awesome to see the fruits of this connection already — and that Scott’s going off to do this kind of work full-time.

What I want to see? Well, the proliferation of OpenID across all the various sites that I use. The cost is minimal since the libraries are being developed on all kinds of platforms — and it should integrate fairly well with existing login schemes. Then I want to see either Ma.gnolia or ClaimID add support for XFN (they already support hCards and ClaimID allows for custom rel values). Then, of course, we need to be able to string together (loosely coupled, mind you) my contact list and my group membership list so that I can import and export them wherever I go (obviously this should be done with microformats). Once we’ve got that situation fleshed out, and I’ve claimed my sites with either MicroID or (preferrably) rel=me, I’ll have a pretty portable social network to carry around the web!

Patent the baby, trademark the bathwater

Feed icon registered trademark?

If you take anything away from the second trademark brouhaha in as many weeks, it’s this quote from Mozilla Chief Lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker:

I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark- type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark – like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.

So obviously, this points to the discussion I’ve been waging towards the establishment of something akin to the Community Mark idea. It’s not that trademark should necessarily go away; instead it’s about providing a choice when traditional trademark law simply does not make sense and only stands to incense and divide communities — which, ironically, such laws were intended to protect.

I don’t think the question in this case really revolves around the question of the meaning of icons so much as the enforcement and consistent use of symbols that come to mean something to a given community. For what Mitchell is really proposing is something more like reverse trademark, where you compel someone to use your mark in a certain way in order to produce consistency. Let’s face it, by restricting the use of the mark or icon, you’re actually moving away from your goal, which in this case is to establish a symbol, to be used in common, to identify a particular interface interaction.

It doesn’t seem like trademark is the appropriate means to the end in this case… and I’m very happy that Mitchell has proposed that the best solution is likely her option #3, “to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and [see] how that works.” This is, I believe, the only true option that stands a chance of gaining widespread adoption as well as heading off the kind of scorn and antipathy that members of the open source community simply don’t need.

OMG Flickr goes gamma!!!

flickr gamma!!

Person MenuWhoa. Whoa. Someone’s been effin’ with my Flickr…! And hmm… do I like it (maybe you care, but probably not)? But, well… I dunno.

It’s bright, ok…

It’s seemingly shinier…

It’s not quite black MacBook sexiness…

It actually seems more complicated. It seems less explorable… I mean, it’s… neat.

I guess I’m kind of dumbfounded. Maybe it will grow on me. I don’t like the two columns of photos with sets on the right… I mean, consider my uploads next to Thomas Hawk’s:

flickr gamma

flickr gamma

I dunno — it just doesn’t seem as pretty as the previous single column.

Am I wrong? Who’s with me on this? Hmm?

Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review

Cardinal Web Clipboard, Photobar, Newspaper

According to VP of Engineering Mark Towfiq, Flock has apparently found a new Director of User Experience… a fella named Will Tschumy. On first glance, I can’t seem to produce a Google Resume for him but I’m eager to find out more about him!

While I’m on the topic of Flock, I have to admit that the latest hourlies of Flock’s upcoming public beta (dubbed Cardinal) are starting to looking really pretty thanks to Bryan Bell (and not ironically reminiscent of his other project, NetNewsWire). So, here’s a brief review (based on Milestone 4).
Continue reading “Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review”

A million cool things

I need to get this out of my system so that I can get back to real work, but damn, there’s plenty o’ cool things in and around the web-making world lately. A sampling of what’s new and decent that you, yes you, dear reader, might check out:

In the WordPress plugin category:

In new web apps:

In the Hack MySpace corner:

In “software you haven’t heard of but should try”:

  • Pastor — still the simplest way to store your usernames, passwords and serials
  • Virtue — multiple desktops, now in active development again (r122)
  • Endo — from the 4-letter-name app creator of 1001 and Ect, a slick newsreader
  • Journler (via Greg Elin) — not the most pretty, but very functional journal (oo! with tags!)
  • Pyro — neat use of Webkit for one purpose: showing Campfire chats (via SvN)
  • Corripio — super simple tool for grabbing album artwork
  • CamiScript — add Applescript support to Camino (script repository)

Got anything you’ve come into recently that you want to pass along? Always looking for the latest and greatest, so drop a note in the comments.

Rashmi Sinha announces D Camp

dcamp v4Last week Rashmi announced D Camp — a Barcamp-styled ad hoc gathering of folks to be held at Ross Mayfield‘s SocialText HQ in Palo Alto May 12 and 13. The event is dedicated to discussing and presenting on design and development:

D is for designers and D is for developers. We hope that this event will attract both designers, developers and anyone else who cares about the user experience. We hope that we will address issues of mutual concern together under the same roof and help build connections between the various communities that care about User Experience.

Scoble also name-dropped… literally — forgetting to mention Rashmi. Ah well — missed a perfectly good opportunity to give props to, as Tara put it, “the brilliant, young woman who is actually putting this together” (emphasis mine).
Hop on the mailing list or wiki if you want to pitch in. As usual, sign up on Upcoming. And — Rashmi’s also look for sponsors and a decent logo (mine’s only a placeholder)!

ALE: Ajax linking and embedding

Those Zimbra guys are so clever. Via O’Reilly, AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) “provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that … the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document.” Download the 0.2 spec and check out the hosted demo.

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

50K Wikis!Hometown hero (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?

I need a Mapendar!

Mapendar sketch

Ok, here’s an idea for some ingenuitive masher.

I’m a visual person. I suck at planning when I can’t visualize the what and where of what I’ll be doing (or what I’ve done). In that single respect, thank Ford for Web 2.0 making things a degree more designerly!

Anyway, here’s what I want.

Take Google or Yahoo Maps. Take my Upcoming feed (or just grab a microformatted event listing like the one on Tantek’s site). And sure, grab a list of free or open wifi hotspots from Plazes. For bonus points, cross-reference the data with my Trazes and Dodgeball checkins to let me know when and if I or my friends have been there. Oh, and yeah, grab stuff from my Flickr stream and hey, Riya? could you like do some searching for photos from the events that I didn’t attend but was watching on Upcoming? Yeah, tanx. And heck, let me throw random things at it like my PiC’s feed or listing of upcoming Barcamps.

Oh, and Flock? Could you like toss in my browser history sorted by geolocation and where I published various blog posts from? Sweet.

Now, I want to see this stuff all pulled in together and tossed on a map. I want 30boxes without the 28, 29, 30 or 31 boxes. I want a big effin’ map (I know Jeremy Kieth can help). And I want to see time represented like sheet music (credit goes to Greg Elin for that idea).

Oh, and please note, this is not a business. It’s an interface.

…Alright, fine, it’s a big old Attention Aggregator — except that it can look into the future and tell me where to be, when. Which makes this what?, an Intention Aggregator? Anh, whatever. It’s a Mapendar and I want one!