I firmly believe that a service like OpenID is necessary and going to take off like wild fire in the next couple of years. I also believe microformats are going to save us from ourselves and Digital Life Aggregators are going to rise up and social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, are going the way of the dinosaur where they belong.

When you let the patients run the asylum you really are in for a bumpy drive and that is what we have going on at OpenID. Nearly the first entry on the text heavy page reads this way: “For geeks.” Look, if you have to specify that its for geeks and that is so important that it is at the top of a page that would fit nicely in encyclopedia britannica, you should know that this is not going to get widespread adoption.

So Jeremiah Owyang ran across a posting at flow|state that provided seven recommendations for improving openID:

1. Redesign the OpenID home page for consumers. The page’s main content should contain a brief explanation of OpenID in consumer-friendly terms, along with a giant Get an Open ID button. Move all the developer material behind a Developers button.
2. Design an end-to-end process for getting an OpenID from a service operator’s site. Since most services won’t care which provider the user uses, let these services send the user into a real flow for picking a provider, getting an ID, and most importantly coming back to the original service to use the new ID. When they get back to the service, the new OpenID should be prefilled.
3. Give the above flow a sidebar titled “Do you have a blog?” that explains that, if they have a blog on LiveJournal, TypePad, etc., they can use that for their OpenID. A link in the sidebar should shunt the user into a page that has them pick their blog provider, then tells them what the (blog service dependent) form of their OpenID is. The flow should then return the user to the service they started on (again, with their OpenID prefilled).
4. Organize the list of providers around factors that can actually influence a user’s decision. Consider offering provider ratings based on ease of use, uptime, etc.
5. Refine reference designs for the complex range of cases that come up in using OpenID with a service. E.g., define the expected behavior and terminology that should be used when a user tries to log in with an OpenID but does not already have an account with that ID.
6. Define guarantees that services should offer to users in the event their OpenID provider goes out of business.
7. Build an organization that can do real usability testing on this service with real consumers.

To this list Jeremiah added:

Perhaps fixing the text heavy homepage so it’s aimed at consumers, the second sentence says “For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman)“. That’s not a way to encourage adoption. The first sentence doesn’t even have a value proposition for the technology. Perhaps segment the homepage for two different users, with two different experiences. Visual demos would be great too.

All of these are great suggestions. I would also like to see openID become the single point for all of my online identity. I want a place I can add all my feeds whether its to my flickr, my blog, etc, so that when I sign up for a site they know all of this about me so I don’t have to enter it again and they can’t integrate my digital life into their experience, thus enhancing my experience.

The network is the computer.

You may have heard this mantra once before. If you are in the tech industry and have a few miles under your saddle you should be intimately familiar with it. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems has been stating this for as along as I can remember. The rest of the tech field ignored it at best, made fun of it at worst.

Eric Schmidt and Google are going to make Sun’s dream a reality. The only truly innovative products that have had wide spread impact in the last three or so years have come from Google. I don’t see this letting up anytime soon so when the CEO of Google defines what the next generation of computing software is going to look like it stands to reason we should listen.

Don’t take my word for it, get it right from the industry leaders mouth (link).

Found via Read/Write Web

How many social networks do you belong to? If I include only the ones I use day-to-day seven. I suspect some of you have even more. That is a lot of networks to hand out to each contact when you connect. Who wants to deal with that? Which of your contacts wants to catalog all your social connections just to link to you and know what your up to? The answer is simple, no one.

The second generation social networks will need to figure this out. I have seen a lot of bursts in this direction, but no one has put it all together yet.

The first thing a second generation social network will need to tackle is the move from object connections to people connections. Current generation social networks are focused on linking people to your objects. They do this by building management and storage software to handle your shared objects. Look at Facebook. Facebook created a photo gallery. It’s ok, but not as full featured as Flickr or photobucket. Instead of building an ok photo gallery, they would have better spent their time building hooks to the existing social photo sites that would let them keep your network up-to-date on the photo’s you have added or updated.

This points out the big problem that needs to be addressed. I don’t want a social network to reinvent the wheel for me. I want to say that “Joe Smith” is someone I want to connect to me network. Oh! He is doesn’t have an account with this social network. Thats ok, we will create a contact for him and you can populate it with all the public social accounts you know about and send him an invite to join.

If “Joe Smith” decides to join the social network and create an account, most of his information is already in his profile because you created it. Now “Joe Smith” wants to take over managing his contact information because he is now a member. No problem. The system sends you, the contact originator, and e-mail with his request. You determine, yep thats Joe, so you approve the contact transfer.

No provide the value added stuff. For a perfect example of this check out the Socialstream demo.

Two companies are dabbling in this space. I know there are more, but these two are the only ones that seem to be on to something and have direction. Spokeo, who allows you to create “friends” and their links to social objects. The other is MyBlogLog with the recent addition of the Service tab that generates a list of your social objects as part of your contact information.

Ok! Who is going to build it?

Tags: Social Networking | Second Generation Social Networks

Read/WriteWeb has an interesting post about creating a standard on how to define web url’s.  As much as I like the proposal isn’t this just a simplistic subset of what Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web is meant to be?

Maybe the Semantic Web revolution needs to start with smaller beginnings.  Another group working on making the Semantic Web a reality is Microformats group.

Getting data out of the stove pipe website and more relevant than todays search results is a fantastic goal.  It is nice to see people begin working on it.

That is the headline at Internet Outsider anyway.  I have to wonder when did $250 million become giving yourself away.  While the pundits are pontificating on how bad this sale is when compared to other recent sales like flickr or, worst of all, YouTube; we really need a reality check.

First of all, none of these services are really all that good.  Lets face it, they are all virtually clones of each other.  We have no ground breaking technological advances in the services that they offer.

What we have is some fairly routine, if not mediocre, software that was slapped together and, through some hefty marketing efforts (read giving away the farm), able to wrangle together a fairly substantial user base.

Anyone who lived through the last online advertising revolt will understand that this is not going to last.  Google has found a way to artificially extend this ad boom, but it will end.  Consumers grow tired of ads rapidly.  The number of clicks will diminish over the next few years, as will the number of people participating in the Google ad network when they realize the only one making money on the ads is Google.

To be honest, I think News Corp. paid to much for photobucket.  The software isn’t rocket science.  They should have just built it for half that amount.  $125 million would have likely given them software that was better than what they got for $250 million from photobucket.  Let’s face it.  Once MySpace offers a photo/video service of their own, photobucket was doomed anyway.

What I am waiting for is a social networking site that is full featured and gets it.  As soon as that happens, all this other junk will fade into the sunset.

Before we write that obituary maybe we should examine what was left out of the Popular Mechanics article that has the net buzzing with disinformation this morning.

Basically the premise of this article is that, with the cost of  coming down, everyone will want to install a home server to handle their computing needs.

I agree with some of the facts in this article.  Computing power is coming down in price and everyone is going to want to utilize this new found power in their homes.  That is where my agreement ends.

I admit that when I use Windows I have much less problems than the average person, but no one can make the claim that Windows is a sound computing platform for the masses.   Security, stability, reliability are very real problems.  What home user wants to take on more of those problems.

What a home user wants is something that just works.  They don’t want to think about it or deal with maintenance on it.  This is why .Mac or Google apps will not be going away, but will actually increase in adoption as time goes on.

In addition to this, the fact that I can connect to .Mac or my Google apps from any device thats connected to the Internet from any location makes it even more appealing.  Why put all my data on a server in my home and then not have it when I am at work or at the mall.

No I think Popular Mechanics put out an article about one man’s infatuation with the new windows home server that had little to do with the reality of the common person.