Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID. You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.
By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services. Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.”
AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. OpenID: Google, Yahoo, IBM and More Put Some Money Where There M. The OpenID Foundation is announcing this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! Have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members. OpenID is a protocol for authenticating your identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use.
The Foundation, which was formed 18 months ago, says it "will not dictate the technical direction of OpenID; instead it will help enable and protect whatever is created by the community. " That often means legal paperwork (to keep a single company from patenting important open standards, for example), and that means money is needed. Fortunately, the newest board members are buying the beer for meetings into the indefinite future; while a seat in the majority "community member" section of the board is free - corporations wanting to make up a minority part of the board have to make a financial donation to the foundation for the position. Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger. After testing OpenID’s as logins to Google’s Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself.
The news confirms TechCrunch UK’s story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train. Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID.
Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. New Video Explains the Basics of Data Portability - ReadWriteWeb. We've been writing a lot about data portability here lately, and specifically the DataPortability.org Work Group. High level members of Google and Facebook staff joined the group a week ago yesterday, key people from LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr and Twitter joined two days after that, the new Mozilla CEO told us last night that his organization is looking closely and will likely join the group. That's all well and good but when does the rubber hit the road?
Where's the beef and what are we waiting for? Though it's only been a week since Google and Facebook staff joined the organization, there's been some key progress made this morning in explaining the aims of the movement. Whereas parts of Data Portability (like OpenID) have been plagued with foggy evangelistic efforts for years, check out the following video explaining the concepts.
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo. I'm really impressed. Google Lodges Patent For Reading Text In Images And Video. A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video. The extension of the application would be that images and video indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself, a big step forward in indexing that has not previously been available.
Information Week suggests that privacy issues raised by Google Maps Street View will get more complicated as eventually YouTube videos will be indexable via the text that appears within them. A full copy of the patent application “Recognizing Text In Images” can be viewed here. Some choice lines from the patent: “Digital images can include a wide variety of content…For example, digital images can illustrate landscapes, people, urban scenes, and other objects. SpreadOpenID is Here to Explain the Options - ReadWriteWeb. Would you like to know more about the different options available for an OpenID account? SpreadOpenID.org is a great looking project aiming to make it easy to learning about and chose a provider for OpenID. Did you hear that? Someone has finally begun a project dedicated to communicating clearly and accessibly about OpenID! Today is a beautiful day. If you're not familiar with OpenID - it's a single-sign-on system that lets you log in to any website that supports OpenID.
That's just the begining of what you can do with OpenID. SpreadOpenID was started by Germans Carsten Poetter and Thomas Huhn. What's on SpreadOpenID? Right now there are two basic offerings on the site. The survey of dedicated OpenID vendors is awesome, covering the basics like security and login requirements but also asking whether the provider offers advanced (and important) features like multiple personas and search-friendly microformats.
Thank Goodness. What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008 - R. Some people say that the bubble's going to take a downturn in the next year or two - that huge numbers of copycat startups are going to shut down, people are going to be out of work and Web 2.0 cheerleaders are going to eat their (our) words. While startup churn is inevitable in any industry (thank goodness we're not restaurant founders!) I think this forecast is selling the future short. There are some big trends I'm really excited about for the web in 2008. Whatever happens to the economy, there's at least a whole lot of innovation to be inspired by right now. Ultimately, I think that will end up brightening the picture for all of us around the world.
Let's Build Some Stuff For each of the 5 big topical trends described below, I've assembled some resources I think will be useful for anyone who wants to keep up with cutting edge developments in these fields in the next year. These resources include: * An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. Open Data Recommendation Dr. Semantic Web Mobile.