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.

Marc Canter has an incredibly insightful interview on The Scoble show. I enjoyed this interview so much I thought it was worth sharing with all of you.

Update: Marc Canter has posted about his interview with a number of links to very interesting information on the subjects he discussed during the interview.

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Up-to-now I have been looking for a way to share my lifestream and at the same time find an easy way to subscribe to lifestreams of those I find interesting. I have found plenty of software in this space. All of it does one of these two things really well. I can nicely share my lifestream or I can easily subscribe to the lifestream of others. None of the software I have looked at does both well.

This has me thinking it’s time to go outside the box or jumping back in the box. I guess this is a matter of perspective. I believe that the blog is the center of someone’s lifestream. It all starts right there, the real meat of someone’s lifestream is the blog. Everything else is just a connection back to the blog.

With that in mind let’s look at two services that might help us out. They are both similar to each other in that the allow you to merge a list of feeds together. The first is from my favorite, yet lacking direction, company Yahoo! with their Pipes product. The other is Feed Digest. Both basically allow you to roll a list of feeds into one feed that you can then distribute to anyone interested right from your blog or an e-mail for that matter.

Both of these services allow you to create a single RSS feed from multiple feeds, I find Feed Digest to be the easiest to work with. It took me a few minutes to create an account and create my lifestream (Subscribe to Elroy’s Lifestream). Feed Digest also supports several ways of exporting and displaying your streams.

Each of these services has their place. Try both and you decide.

Once you have a consolidated lifestream its a simple enough task to list it right on your blog for your friends to locate. Thus moving you to the focal point of your network instead of the application being that focal point (think Facebook and MySpace)

I stumbled across Stowe Boyd’s write up on a service called Lijit. It’s a fantastic application that, given just your blog url, does a fantastic job of finding all the services that you belong to. It then provides a widget that you can place in your site with some various configuration options for display to show all the services you use.

The auto-discovery as part of the sign-up process is just remarkable.

This is a tool that makes it simple to aggregate your online identity. Place it on your blog and now it is simple to share with anyone that wants to stay connected to you.

This is a fantastic service I urge everyone to give it a try.

Fred Oliveira of the Webreakstuff blog decided to talk about the elephant in the room earlier this month. There’s a new social network going online every day and its a big elephant that everyone wants to ignore. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except for some reason people like to join them all. It’s gotten to the point that individuals are spending so much time managing their friends and different accounts that they tend to be a lot less social.

There several model’s for dealing with this out there right now:

• The Facebook Model: No world exists outside of Facebook. (Further reading)
• The Ning Model: If one network is good 80,000 must be better.
• The Spokeo Model: Why join another network. If you can find your friends feeds we will make it simple to follow the conversation.

None of these models as they exist today are really great. Some, like Spokeo, show great promise. Others, like Ning, seem just plain crazy (but really well funded).

Oliveira suggests an alternative that I feel shows promise. The OpenId/Microformats alternative. The specs exist. How to process and use the data is easy for applications. The fatal flaw right now is that it shoots right over the average persons head. OpenId is a mystery to most people. No one understands how to use it or even why. Microformats have yet to be adopted seriously by the blog software creators or other sites for that matter. Do you really expect every user to learn XFN?

If this model is to gain traction it needs wide spread adoption and it needs to be easy enough for the average person to use. It needs better marketing. People need to believe they can’t live without it. Somehow adoption of things like OpenId will make our lives easier but right now it just makes signing up to services harder and unclear.

This model needs an evangelist to rise up and champion the battle like we had for web standards. But at this point is it to late?

If you haven’t heard about Profile Builder you may want to check it out. Profile Builder is, simply put, a place to aggregate your profile information. I can add photo’s, a short bio, host a resume, link to my blog or other “networks” and it aggregates them all together in one spot with one url.

I love the concept but the current Beta is much rougher than you would expect an application to be. About all I was able to do is create an account and it took a while before that was even working. It may use Internet Explorer only features, but I didn’t take the time to check and I won’t. I use a Mac. I checked it in both Safari and Firefox with the same results.

I recommend checking it out because the concept is great. But don’t get your hopes up that it is a place to aggregate your profile, because most of it just doesn’t work.

The idea of aggregating your profile information is great. What I don’t understand is why companies like this don’t give me a way to locate my contacts profile’s. They know who they are so make it easy for me to find them. Spokeo is another company that let’s me enter in your information but then doesn’t tell me if you have any other RSS feeds that I would like to subscribe to. The information is there, why not let me use and make my life easier.

Now this is the ultimate application. Combine Profile Builder with Spokeo, add in a way for me to discover my contacts profile and feeds, since you have it if they have an account. Polish it up. Now that would be a fantastic service that provides real value without all the clutter of MySpace and Facebook.

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

Maybe I have been thinking about the killer application the wrong way.

Consider this Jeff Croft’s lifestream:

To borrow a phrase I first heard from the Scobelizer, its like a river of data. Most recent activity at the top and then the rest in a descending list.

What we really need is a service that allows an individual to create their lifestream. Add the important part missing from Jeff Croft’s life stream, RSS.

Update:  Jeff Croft’s lifestream does have an RSS feed. (link)

So you have a service that will let you collect your life stream data into one space. For instance, I use del.icio.us for bookmarks, Flickr for photo’s, and Wordpress for blogging. I would add those three services into my lifestream.

You can send your lifestream out for friends to subscribe to. Since its formatted as RSS, they can import it into any reader the like. If they want a little more value added then you provide an interface similar to Spokeo for ingesting the lifestreams and aggregating them together.

Simplicity with value added services is what people want.