Sometimes the results of OpenID logins look a little bit strange, certainly not as expected by users. Blog comments are a good example. Usually I would expect my real name or username displayed there but occasionally it looks like this:

The provider simply didn’t send my name (Google in this case).

While some providers allow personas, i.e. users can create different sets of login information, e.g. one with a business email address and one with a personal one, the most don’t. So what can users do if they want to change
any of the information like name or email address? Actually not very much. Changing the information before each login at the provider is not really an option. Switching to a provider that features personas is a good idea but doesn’t suit all users.

Disqus is a comment system for various platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and many more, and is tackling at least one part of this problem in a rather elegant way. Among other ways it lets users comment with their OpenID. When commenting users see this popup:

They can easily change the display name. It’s a small popup, it’s unobtrusive, and a good example of how relying parties can improve the user experience of OpenID. Well done!

Oh no, not another post on OpenID already, you might think. Well, the new year is only a few days old and there are already three posts and tweets respectively that got me thinking about it again. But if you don’t want to read about OpenID again, just ditch this post.

The Idea of OpenID Connect

Let’s start with Chris Messina’s proposal of OpenID Connect that got some attention in the blogosphere over the last few days. According to Chris OpenID Connect should be a concept similar to Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect:

OpenID Connect is a technology that lets you use an account that you already have to sign up, sign in, and bring your profile, contacts, data, and activities with you to any compatible site on the web.

For the more tekkie guys of you, OpenID Connect should leverage Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, and OAuth WRAP among others.

Sounds good? At long last, a product based on OpenID that could be marketed and is similar to its rival Facebook Connect? Maybe. But we could have that product for a long time already. Isn’t there an OpenID/OAuth Hybrid protocol? Isn’t it possible to perform discovery of a service catalogue containing contacts, photos, and much more via XRDS-Simple?

I cannot comment on the technical differences of both approaches or their shortcomings. I simply don’t know them and never really had a look at OAuth WRAP so far. I’m just a dumb enduser. But from what I can tell it was possible to build something similar to Facebook Connect that wasn’t a product but a combination of a few protocols that could work almost the same way. However, no one cared to think about a reference implementation and documented it. So at least Chris’s idea of OpenID Connect could start a new discussion – and actually much needed work – about establishing a product based on open standards. I just hope marketing efforts will follow.

Email Anyone?

Last night I spotted a tweet by Hutch Carpenter, a name which should be familiar to those involved with Enterprise 2.0. Hutch had a really simple request:

Yes, it is as simple as this: Hutch just wants an email transferred while signing up to a new service. Those of you familiar with OpenID know that it’s possible. There is the Simple Registration Extension (SREG) and there is Attribute Exchange (AX). Both protocol extensions allow transferring an email address – among other data – from the OpenID provider to the consuming website, the relying party. Though both parties – the provider and the relying party – need to support them. However this great feature is mostly unknown to even tech savvy guys like Hutch.

How come? Back in the days of the old OpenID version 1.1 most providers and relying parties supported SREG. Unfortunately, when big providers like Google and Yahoo! jumped on board of OpenID this fine extension got forgotten by most people, simply because the big vendors didn’t support it. When Yahoo! started supporting some SREG values in November 2008 it was applauded and reading some of the blog posts about it, it sounded like Yahoo! re-invented the wheel. Hey, the current SREG specification is final since June, 2006! Yes, since the summer of 2006. So no real invention in the winter of 2008.

Confusion about the OpenID Name

The next blog post suprised me a little bit and I thought the blogger was probably an exception for getting some aspects of OpenID wrong. Basically, she thought she had to pay $25 for getting an OpenID when visiting OpenID.net. As it turned out, she was confused with the membership fee of the OpenID Foundation. Actually, I thought this would never happen. But it did and what if she was not the only one as she pointed out in the comments? Also she already had an OpenID from MyOpenID but thought it was something different, just because of the name.

OpenID Needs Marketing

Those three examples show one thing: OpenID needs more marketing! Though any marketing needs a product. So OpenID Connect or whatever it will be called in the end is a step in the right direction. Marketing should be done by those who know their job: marketers. Not developers as is the case mostly these days.

Also it’s probably a good idea to get more in touch with big tech blogs like Techcrunch, Mashable, and Read Write Web. They have turned mostly into news sites that need a story to write about. They hardly do intense research, so no one can expect them to find out the subtle technical details of something like OpenID, its extensions and related protocols. So in the end OpenID might get better press and won’t look like the inferior identity protocol to Facebook Connect.

Yesterday, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) published its review of 2009. The numbers mentioned in the blog post look great. Having over 1 billion OpenID enabled accounts worldwide and over 9 million sites that let users log in with an OpenID are truly impressive numbers. Also it is a great list of companies providing or consuming OpenID.

I also applaud the OIDF for cooperating with the US government and initiating a strategy where OpenID logins on federal government websites become reality. It is a great way to help citizens engage with government agencies because they don’t need to register again just to gather some information, making an appointment and what not. Hopefully, this will become a blueprint for other governments as well.

However, having a closer look at the blog post, it becomes apparent that all that glitters is not gold. At least in my opinion.

• Some of the mentioned OpenID providers like German GMX and Web.de are hardly recognizable as providers. Users can only use credentials of those email providers on Facebook. Well, actually (automatic) login only works if users are already logged in to those providers and Facebbok makes a checkid_immediate call. Having login credentials that only work for one website? Interesting concept.
• Many big and small companies are mentioned that accept OpenID. However quite a lot of them rely on JanRain’s RPX. There is nothing wrong with it. JanRain is about the only small, independent OpenID company that established a viable business model with RPX.

  But RPX is not only featuring OpenID as a login option but also Facebook Connect and Twitter among others. And some of the companies listed in the blog post don’t even allow logins with custom OpenIDs. Just have a look at the Wetpaint and Qype login screens:

  

  Wetpaint

  

  Qype

  Yes, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google logins are based on OpenID but users cannot use a custom OpenID.

• And some of the mentioned companies have not even deployed OpenID yet, e.g. German Scout24, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. If I got things right, Scout24 will also use RPX.

Yes, OpenID progressed in 2009. Though the technology has become more hidden, either behind obscure provider implementations like at GMX or behind buttons and logos of big vendors like Yahoo! and Google. Actually, it is not bad that technology becomes less obvious for users but the original idea of OpenID is gone as well: Having a URL

To empower individuals to define and offer and enforce their own terms in their interactions with others. To not merely be somebody’s user or consumer, but to be a first-class citizen of the net. To not be at the mercy of any government or organization.

as Johannes Ernst wrote in a recent blog post.

This blog post is a little bit different from the not so relevant open web centric stuff you usually find here. However I think it’s a good story about great customer service. So why not share it with you, although I play the stupid part in this story?

On Sunday I checked my credit card bill and discovered that I was charged a few Euros from VeriSign, more specifically from GWS VeriSign as it was stated on the credit card slip. That charge didn’t make sense to me because I didn’t purchase anything from VeriSign recently. Though the credit card slip also stated the three letters VIP. In February I bought a VeriSign Identity Protection credential but that was a one-time charge. So I wondered why I was charged again. Also my credit card company couldn’t provide more details about the transaction.

So without much further thought and research I emailed support at VeriSign Labs. VeriSign Labs is responsible for some of VeriSign’s identity programs like the OpenID Provider. Don’t ask me why I emailed VeriSign Labs, just have a look at the first few words at the beginning of this paragraph. But I got a quick reply from them on Monday and much to my surprise it was from Gary Krall, the technical director for the PIP. Gary and I were in contact in the past already, talking about VeriSign’s OpenID Provider.

As you can guess from Gary’s title, his job has nothing to do with credit card transactions of his company or customer service. However he offered to find out what was going on at VeriSign and track down the responsible department and people. No easy task, considering the size of the company. But Gary made me feel taken seriously, sending daily updates about the progress of his research. I think that’s awesome!

The results of Gary’s research made me look stupid, though. It turned out that a company called Global Warehouse Solutions was distributing VeriSign’s VIP credentials in Europe but didn’t charge customers right after the purchase. I checked my credit card bills since February and realized this was true. I was never charged for the credential so far.

I feel so bad and totally stupid about this. I should have checked the bills right away. Rather I opted for emailing VeriSign’s support, harassing Gary and causing trouble at different departments at the company.

Nevertheless I am grateful for experiencing the support Gary – and all other people involved – provided. I think it is a remarkable example of customer service. Thanks a lot!

Microformats are really cool. Small snippets of code that semantically describe various information included in any published text on the web. It’s not visible information for end-users but rather metadata that can be crawled and parsed by search engines or extracted by other means, like browser add-ons.

While microformats are rather simple – even I understand most of them – there might be use cases where coders unfamiliar with them run into problems, have questions about proper implementation or need some other information they can’t find elsewhere on the web. They need help. Quickly. Microformateers come to the rescue.

Microformateers is simply a Twitter account run by people who know microformats inside out. Some are even authors of various microformats. Among them are usual suspects like Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik but also fellow German Matthias Pfefferle. They provide quick support for those who need it.

I think Micoformateers is a great concept. It provides a low-threshold service, is quick and doesn’t need any resources other than the people’s time involved with it. Probably not all problems can be solved by Twitter but it’s good enough for small hints or a link for further reading that make life of coders easier. Well done!

Some of the best things in life happen when you least expect them. Suddenly they are right here and you’re happy. That is especially true to things you loved dearly in the past but disappeared months before without warning. Like Ma.gnolia, the small but beautiful and elegant bookmarking service. Needless to say, the tweet by Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff got me really excited.

I don’t want to recap the reasons why Ma.gnolia went offline earlier this year. Instead head over to CrunchGear and read the interview with Larry Halff or do some research yourself. You know, there are those really useful sites out there called search engines.

It’s Social

Those of you who never heard about Ma.gnolia before may ask what’s so special about it. It’s only a social bookmarking service, right? And there’s Delicious, the grand daddy of social bookmarking.

Well, Ma.gnolia isn’t just storing all of your bookmarks. The real value of the service are its social features. There are groups dealing with all kinds of topics (well, currently there aren’t many as Ma.gnolia’s user base is still small after the relaunch but in the past there were countless), so you can see what other users think is relevant and interesting about the topics and issues you care or want to know more about.

Also I’m glad that one feature has survived: Giving thanks to other users for adding a bookmark to Ma.gnolia. They found an interesting link on the web, donated some time to add tags and maybe a description to it, so you can easily add it to your bookmark collection. Just show some appreciation for a great link. It’s the small things that make life great.

Open Standards

Since I’m a supporter of open standards, it’s great to know that Ma.gnolia is still relying on them. It supported many of them before its demise already.

You want to sign in to Ma.gnolia? Better have an OpenID. There is no way to sign in with a username and password. Also no Twitter logins, no Facebook Connect. Well, those login methods might be options to think about but I guess Larry Halff rather stays with more open methods like OpenID.

Also all important information is marked up with microformats, from user profiles, to contacts, to bookmarks, to tags,… Ma.gnolia has them all. Also users can subscribe to groups, tags, and people by RSS.

If you want to know more about the standards Ma.gnolia is using, have look at a small article I wrote about the topic last year. Most of them are still there.

If you think these standards are just some geeky additions, you might want to think again. When Ma.gnolia disappeared users couldn’t access the service anymore and their bookmarks were unavailable. But due to those standards users could find them elsewhere on the internet and restore at least a great part of them. That’s not replacing a backup strategy, of course. But if the bookmarks were hiding behind a walled garden, they were gone. All of them, forever. I’m using Delicious to back up my bookmarks, by the way.

The Not So Relevant Service for Readers

Alright, the headline is a joke but read on. If you’re using both Ma.gnolia and Google Reader you might want to add Ma.gnolia to the Send to list of Google Reader, so you can easily bookmark you favorite articles when reading your feed items. Just head over to the settings page of Google Reader and add the necessary information:

Currently users need to sign up for an invitation to Ma.gnolia. But please do yourself a favor and check it out. You might like it.

Update Oct 6: Since yesterday Ma.gnolia is just called Gnolia because another company is claiming the name.

Just drop the ma. everywhere (e.g. in your Google Reader settings) and you should be able to use Gnolia just like before. However if you use an OpenID Provider that supports directed identity (e.g. Yahoo! and Google) you have to re-associate your OpenID with Gnolia. Just go to http://gnolia.com/recover and recover your account. Delete the OpenID from your settings and re-associate it. In the case of directed identity the OpenID Provider issues a unique URL for each Relying Party. Ma.gnolia and Gnolia are seen as different websites by those providers.

Thanks to Larry Halff for providing fast support and dealing with this issue last night!

Attention: Don’t read this if you despise meta blogging!

Once in a while I do what probably every blogger does: I check the number of feed subscribers and the number of visitors to my blog. I don’t do that regularly, though, because the numbers are low and don’t change much anyway. However I was much surprised last night when having a look at the FeedBurner statistics.

FeedBurner’s Reach

FeedBurner is not only publishing the number of feed subscribers but also a measurement called Reach, introduced about two years ago. According to FeedBurner Reach means:

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

Also it means:

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Usually Reach is only a small percentage of the number of feed subscribers. Sometimes this number even equals zero, at least for this blog. Well, that’s not really surprising considering the sporadic updates of the blog. However things changed after my last article.

Not only did the number of Reach increase, it even surpassed the number of feed subscribers. The following day Reach was three times more than the number of feed subscribers. I was stunned last night when realizing this. How could this happen? I had a look at Google Analytics expecting a considerable increase in visitors to the blog. Of course, there was the usual increase after a new article was published, but nothing spectacular. I double-checked with StatCounter but the same results.

Shared Article

Both analytic tools showed something interesting, though. Visitors came from various social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and some more. I had visitors from those sites before, of course, but this time they outnumbered any other sources. And that’s probably the reason for the high number of Reach. The article was shared and re-shared on various platforms by different people. I don’t know who shared the article and I don’t know on which platforms it appeared. But it seems it had found its readers.

Nothing changed for this blog, though. The number of visitors and the number of feed readers stayed the same, basically. Also I don’t know how exactly FeedBurner is measuring Reach. It’s probably exaggerated and not accurate. But it is obvious to me that not only page views are dead but also feed subscriber numbers.

In the past I switched feed readers quite often: Google Reader, FeedDemon, Bloglines, NetNewsWire,… Sometimes I even used multiple readers at the same time, switched back and forth between them. At the moment Google Reader is my feed reader of choice again while NetNewsWire is working as some kind of offline backup. If I was still on a PC FeedDemon replaced NetNewsWire, of course.

Why Google Reader?

The main reason for switching to Google Reader was the sharing option. Users can share interesting articles publicly, while others can subscribe to those shared articles and import them into their own feed reader. It’s a RSS feed after all, right? That’s great, actually. I see more interesting articles throughout the day without having to subscribe to even more blogs and news sources. Currently, I’m subscribed to 435 feeds anyway, if I got that right. I certainly don’t need much more subscriptions.

The Problem

As I mentioned above, it’s great to read interesting articles. Though being subscribed to more than 400 feeds means a lot of articles are marked unread when opening Google Reader again. If you – like me – can’t check your feed reader for several hours this is especially true. So some filters are required to cope with the vast number of unread articles because you don’t want to miss articles that are relevant to you, do you?

Currently, I’m testing a mix of theme based folders (sports, Apple, music) and folders based on the blog’s relevance to me, i.e. sorting blogs into a category like ‘must read’ which I want to check daily and two other categories which are less important, so it doesn’t matter if I miss them. This combination works quite well so far.

Shared Articles and Relevance

So where do those shared articles from other users fit into this scheme? Well, the good news is that Google Reader is summarizing them in the left sidebar.

This is nice. A list of articles handpicked by people I trust. Though this list can become quite long. Also it is natural that the same article is shared by various people sometimes.

List view of articles in Google Reader:

An individual article:

Could Google Reader sort that list by relevance? I mean if two or more people I follow share the same article it is probably relevant to me, isn’t it? It would be great if those articles were highlighted or summarized in a special folder.

Google Reader also doesn’t recognize every time that an article was already shared by someone else and I already marked it as read. I see it twice or even more often.

It was absolutely awesome if Google Reader recognized my interests and sorted articles according to them. Then folders were more or less obsolete. APML was an option, I guess.

Oh yeah, German blog netzwertig had an article on Google Reader as well today. It made me think about the topic a little bit.

Some of you probably noticed that I blogged again for the first time since about three months yesterday. Well, that’s not really the spectacular news, mind you. But it was the first time I could make use of PubSubHubbub which was released in the meantime. And I was blown away!

PubSubHubbub is a fancy new protocol, created by some clever folks at Google. Basically, it allows anyone that supports it to get feeds (Atom and RSS) more or less in real time. Blog authors don’t have to wait for their blog to be crawled again by feed aggregators and the like until their new articles are distributed to all their feed subscribers.

Among other services, Feedburner and Friendfeed support the protocol already. So when I hit the Publish button in WordPress yesterday I didn’t remember PubSubHubbub or even that those services support it. After publishing the article I wanted to inform my followers on Twitter about the new article. But much to my surprise there already was a tweet by me about it.

What happened? Well, actually, it’s pretty simple: Feedburner got pinged and its PingShot service notified Friendfeed. In my Friendfeed settings I enabled that entries from my blog will be sent directly to Twitter (forgot about that setting as well, as you can imagine). Voilà, all this happened in a few seconds, long before I could even tweet the blog post myself.

All I can say is, PubSubHubbub is awesome! Check it out if you can. Also if you don’t want to use Feedburner you can download a WordPress plugin that will do the same.

Sometimes it’s difficult to sell OpenID to new users. When people ask about it, I usually praise one aspect of the protocol: the ease of login to websites with an identifier people know and use regularly, e.g. their blog URL. This is an obvious benefit which people are able to understand. Also it’s a fast way to log in to websites. At least, that’s what I thought so far. Though I’m not sure anymore.

When German service Yiid implemented JanRain’s RPX a couple of weeks ago, I fiddled about with it a little while, especially with the various ways of login to Yiid. For those who don’t know, RPX manages logins and authentication for Relying Parties. Users can easily click on the button of a familiar identity provider (Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook,…) to log in to websites. OpenID is another available option.

So apart from the usual username and password Yiid offers a couple more options to log in now. The login screen looks like this:

On the left side you see the RPX logins, on the right side the username/password login box. As you can also see, the latter login box is pre-filled with my username and password already. I saved these details in Safari before. Also I associated the various available options of RPX with Yiid before and logged in to those services.

Now what’s the fastest way to log in to Yiid?

• Username and password: 1 click
• Google: 1 click
• Twitter: 1 click
• Live ID: 1 click
• Facebook: 1 click
• MySpace: 2 clicks

For MySpace there is another click required (see below). I don’t know why, though.

So what’s up with my OpenID, my blog URL? Well, I have to click the OpenID button, then I have to type in the URL of my blog and click the Anmelden (=Sign in) button.

Oops, that definitely takes some time. It’s the slowest one of all options available.

Of course, things looked a little bit different if I were not logged in to the various identity services before. Then I had to log in to them during authentication. But the same applied to OpenID.

The fastest way to log in is username and password if the credentials are saved either in the browser or in a password manager like 1Password. Oddly, the username/password side of Yiid also loads way faster than the RPX one. I would have clicked login with username and password long before RPX is even loaded.
If people don’t use those features or apps described above login takes longer, of course. But OpenID was still the slowest option (typing in the URL, clicking sign in button, logging in to OpenID Provider, clicking button).

So my “selling” point of fast logins with my own URL is none anymore. There are still other benefits of OpenID, of course, like signing up to new services, being in control of the URL and many more which have to be considered when choosing the right option for oneself.
Also I have to mention that OpenID is also the technology used for the Google and MySpace logins. But still.

Is there a way that the OpenID login boxes can be pre-filled with the correct URL? Can it be saved by browsers or password managers? Would be great!