If you discover this profile via Yahoo! Search you can now directly choose from the actions: add friend, poke, send message and view friends and it also pulls in my profile picture from Facebook.

Well, I think that’s really an eye opener for how an distributed social networking approach & philosophy can be merged into web search and with that become also an even more integrated part of the web itself.

Why is this idea interesting in relation to DiSo?

If you see social networking as an building block of the web, which not just takes place within the boundaries of a single services, but as an distrubted approach, where everybody set up his own DiSo node which can talk to all the other nodes out there, based on common open standards, independent from where these nodes are hosted and how they have been created … its just an logical next step, to …

• make use of the structured content, which these public profiles provide, to create better search results
• to treat this nodes also differently within search result pages than “normal” websites by adding special actions

If you find peoples profiles within a search result page - and if you can figure out due to the structured content which is presented to you, that this is the person you are looking for - it just makes sense to directly request a friendship for example, which then will be (if you apply the DiSo approach) added to your social graph, independently from which plattform the person is actually using and from which tool/service you use to maintain your social graph.

So an really interesting approach Facebook and Yahoo! are showing us here … now we “only” need to get with DiSo to the point, where we have open standards and a common understanding for an implementation of these actions between independent DiSo nodes, so that Yahoo! SearchMonkey can integrate those DiSo profiles of the future aswell

Just a few days ago we launched our beta (still closed and still limited German speaking countries) of our new services, which embraces quite a lot of concepts and standards of the Open Web, like the whole OpenStack or the idea of distributed social networking.

So basically all the stuff I write here about for years now

It’s a real pleasure to actually make this things also happen right now and not only to write about it anymore! And therefore I thought it would be a nice idea to outline a few basics concepts of the new myON-ID and to let you know a bit more about it in English as anything related to the service is still only available in German.

What is myON-ID basically about?

To understand the whole scope of our open web approach you should first of all need to get an basic understanding of what it is in general. The whole service stands on three pillars:

1. Monitoring

Within our monitoring you find stuff from and/or about you on the internet. We search an always increasing list of sources all across the web for your first- and lastname and also allow you to add a few more keywords to make the search results even better. (like your nickname)

In the monitoring interface you can then easily sort out what is about you and what’s not and also enrich your correct search results with an individuell title, description and tags.

We also look for your profiles at other services and if you sort out the suggested accounts - which belong to you - you will have your lifestream up and running. You have several filters to easily zapp through all your stuff, for example based on just content-types, and it’s just integrated all together in a nice and smooth interface.

And of course … that not only works for yourself, but also for the stuff your contacts at myON-ID mark as theirs and for what comes from their lifestreams!

2. Marketing

Marketing means in our case, that we give you the possibility to create your own profile, which is really flexible and allows you to do all kinds of different stuff with it. It doesn’t has a narrow grid in which you have to put in all your stuff, but you can arrange and design it for your own purposes.

Your profile works seamlessly together with your monitoring and you can easily display content on your profile, which you have sorted out and especially tagged in the monitoring before. I can then for example just add a widget on my profile displaying pictures which I have tagged “screenshots” and label this whole module “My Screenshots”.

You can have your lifestream on your profile, configure pretty precisely what should be shown and what not and switch between different views. These branded boxes you see on the screenshots is one of the views. You and your vistors can of course comment on all those things and therefore the plattform allows you to have conversations with other people, about the stuff you put on your profile.

As a premium user you can go even a step further and remove the myON-ID branding from your profile and get an top-level domain for it, so that it really becomes your profile, with your content, which of course you and not we own

3. Management

Management means different things for us. First of all we give you an addressbook, which not only can handle contacts at myON-ID itself, but your whole social graph!

We give you quite a few possibilites to import, soon subscribe and maybe at some time even synchronize your social graph from different sources and of course that all works not with collecting a lot of passwords from you, but with OAuth + API’s and Co.

If you now have your aggregated social graph in one place, it of course also makes sense to be able to define the relationships to these people and to apply on top of that a decent privacy model.

More over its just consequent, that if you …

• can aggregate simply all your stuff in one place
• to sort it out and to show it to your social-graph and the public
• can apply different privacy settings towards different relationships
• spent a lot of time with maintining and enriching this information with meta-data

… that you can make use of it elsewhere and that’s the reason why there is myON-ID Connect - all based on the open stack of course!

So you will be able to use your profile URL as an OpenID and we will catch up as fast as possible with all the developments, to expand this whole approach to contacts, activities and more to make your entire identity as portable as possible depending on your needs.

Everything in and everything out! Two-Way API’s

To talk open web now: we have basically the philosophy to make myON-ID as open as possible in both directions. So we want you to be able to use different ways to get stuff into the myON-ID monitoring and therefore onto your profile and we want you to be able to get all the stuff you aggregate and maintain there also out again.

Getting stuff in means to support third-party API’s, delegated authorization, structured data (Microformats / RDF), to allow users to login with third-party OpenIDs and so on.

Getting stuff out again can mean granting access to your data to other services via API’s (i.e. OpenSocial REST), taking your stuff with you via your OpenID pointing at it or just a plain export of your data for your hard-drive.

At the end of our vision there is the idea to become an handy and well done plattform within something which you could call the “Open Mesh” (like Marc Canter does), which helps to wire the web and makes your online life and the management of your online identity just easier and more comfortable, without all those breaks and hurdles messing up your online experience.

Distributed Social Networking

We at myON-ID all strongly believe in the concept of open distributed social networking and will adapt this whole concept step by step as soon as possible.

Our objective is to build the best tool available for individuals to manage their entire online identity in terms of an holistic approach - and that includes for us to not keep our users within the boundaries of myON-ID itself, but to give them the freedom to represent themself independantly from our brand and also to enable them to connect with everybody who’s present on the web and not just the myON-ID userbase.

Therefore we will integrate open standards and special features to support the idea of DiSo soon and hope to be able to contribute to the level of adaption and the level of understanding for the need and benefits of DiSo.

International Version of myON-ID

So I hope I could so far give you an better understanding of what we are doing with myON-ID and what our philosophy is regarding the open web. Right now we are still only available in German, but will of course open up the doors to an internationl userbase as soon we are ready for that

Will still take some time, as we have this product in beta right now, have our first experiences with our beta-testers from Germany and want to develop it further to a certain degree, before we open it up for a much bigger potential audience, than we have now in Germany.

If you are interested in learning more, don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments! Will try to answer as much as I can there

By the way a really nice German review about the new myON-ID you can find at Netzwertig. The translation of the headline is “The new myON-ID - Half Xing and a quarter FriendFeed” ;

The article also mentiones our “bi-directional” OpenID support. Means that we not only are OpenID provider, but also accept OpenID als singup/login method ourselfs. More details about the new release here in English soon

Looking forward to meet you there if you like!

I also just created a Brightkite Wall for the event tag. I think Brightkite isn’t that popular in Germany (yet), but let’s see if it maybe gets used in the context of a Microblogging conference If you have an iPhone, make sure to check out their pretty nice iPhone app!

The questions of this blog post is: how does a context affects your understanding of privacy and which role play personas in this situation?

I talked in the last months a lot with people about privacy to learn more about their understanding of privacy on the internet and I discovered pretty different approaches to privacy and I am still not sure how do handle privacy online in a way, that it satisfies everbody needs.

In this blog post I want to elaborate on my findings, ideas and own approaches and would also like to ask yo about your personal approaches and opinions? First of all let me give you a few example to get the whole scope of the topic.

A small example to illustrate the importance of context for privacy

If you are an average Twitter user, who has his tweets public and a few dozen friends, you absolutely are able to overlook who is listening to you and this will have an impact on what you say on Twitter. If you compare it with the real world, it’s maybe like being on a private party with an “open-door-policy”, where theoretically everybody could show up, if he knows that the party is taking place.

You know what kind of people will be at this party, this will impact on what you might say or how you behave (or how much you will drink ) in this context - you will show the people who are there a “persona” of you - and even if it’s possbile that for example your boss or your mother could show up - because it has open doors and let’s eveybody in, this will not affect you, because the probability is way to low.

So this “natural” barrier, that it is quite unlikely that your boss or your mom will know about this party - and even if they would, that they would spend the time and the effort to actually go there. is such high that it protects you and your privacy in this special context.

So is this metaphor really tranferable to the internet? In my eyes: yes and no. Let me tell you why.

Opinion One: you can’t transfer this construct on the internet

Because Google kills this “natural” barrier - Google eliminates a public context, as it exist in the real world! Everything which is published on the internet and not protected can be found by Google, prolly will be found by Google and if a total stranger or somebody who shouldn’t see it will discover it, is hard to predict.

That your Twitter profile and your tweets will show up on Googles first or second page - if somebody googles your name - can happen, but it not necesarrily has to happen!

To my surprise for example you will not find any tweet or my twitter profile on the first couple of pages if you google for my name, although it’s public, I have a lot of followers and also tweet quite regulary. At the moment this barriers seems to work for me, as long I can oversee who follows me and with the expeption of tweets appearing in searches not related to my name.

But of course your tweets potentially could also show up in any other search, than just a search for your name, if it is related to what you have said on Twitter. You can’t simulate every possible search-scenario to proof it - you also do not know what might happen in the future, what will have an effect on the listing on Google.

Following this argumentation would support people who say: if you publish something on the internet, which is not protected, be carefull and expect everybody to find it or STFU! Everybody can see it and it’s your fault if you bring yourself in an unfavorable situation.

BUT … I think there is also an other perspective, which is valid nevertheless:

Opition Two: you can transfer this contruct on the internet

The problem with my argumentation from above is, that a lot of people also draw the conclusion, that due to the fact, that Google can find your stuff anyway, that it also allows them to put your public available content into a new context. (due to aggregation for example)

Let’s get back to the Twitter example. Imagine I have a friend on Twitter, who also uses Facebook. This friend has all his business contacts on Facebook, but I only have private friends on Twitter. If he now integrates a Twitter application, which not only shows his own, but also his Friends tweets, he promotes actively my tweets, originally published for my friends, to his business contacts.

Now let’s imagine he has a business contact, which I know as well. I now tweet something to my private friends - I am aware of the fact, that it could be found on Google, if someone is actively searching for it - but the natural barrier is high enough for me, because the probability that a business contacts of mine actively googles my name and starts searching for my Tweets, is really really low.

It also wouldn’t be embarrissing for me, if a business contact actually would find it on Google, but if I would have spoken about the same topic to a business contact, I maybe would have choosen another tonality and maybe even slightly different details of the story.

But now my dear friend suddenly actively promotes this tweets to his business contacts! That totally changes the situation, increases the probability that it is shown to someone else and breaks my protection barrier and doesn’t respects the context I published it in the first place.

My own fault? I have published it in on the world wide web (you really should take that in literal sense) and not restricted access to this information, so that my friend was able to aggregate it in a new context, which I can’t control anymore?

I think the answer is not that clear as it appears to be

I personally know a lot of people who now would say: yes, it is your own fault. Make your tweets private and only add your friends and the problem would be solved. True, but …

… I talked really a lot to people about this topic in the last few months and always used this Twitter example to illustrate what I am talkling about. And the results really surprised me. From my persaonal experience, sure that isn’t representative, the amount of people who actually transfer the concept of a context - and the natural barrier, which is bounded to this context - to the internet is really really big.

It’s a learned construct of the real world and for a lot of people it a matter of course, that this context should also apply and be respected on the internet - even without restricting access to information.

I have for example heard this sentences from someone who wasn’t happy with just making his tweets protected, to solve the problem:

I haven’t restricted access to the information, because I want other people - who prolly use this service and are within the group of people I expect there to be - to find this information. Restricting doesn’t work for me. I want the context where my stuff appears to be respected.

The question now is: Do we have to teach everybody, that if he publishs publicly, he needs to behave like he is broadcasted on CNN, where the whole world can potentially see him, or should we have the right to adjust our behavior and what we say based on the context we are in, and expect this context as respected by others?

It’s not black and white - it’s also about tonality and personas

The problem actually is, that this problem can’t be solved with just protecting everything, as already said before. Because you just simply can’t! To understand this, not only think of total embarrassing stuff, which shouldn’t be published anyway - if it is protected or not. (don’t drink and tweet)

For me it’s also about tonality, about audiences, about the depth of information, the macke-up and about the control of where my stuff appears.

I simply choose another language if I write something for a friend or a business contact. Or if I write something for Geeks or for Marketing people. I explain things differently based on the audience. I hand out different details - even if all details potentially are available anyway.

The question also is: if the protection by contexts is really not working on the internet, based on which audience I then have to publish publicily? Based on which persona I have to publish my stuff then? Always like I am in a business context? Always like talking to strangers?

My personal opinion

I have to say, that in my opinion the context in which I publish publicily also needs to respected to some degree! I am aware of the fact, that potentially everybody can find stuff about me via Google or just by accident - because it is in the public domain, but I nevertheless behave based on the context I am in, include to a certain degree the protection by the context and I simply wish this context could be respected.

And that means for me, that I want to stay in the control of the context in which my stuff appears. I would exlude search engines in this case, because I also see the need to have search-engine, which can potentially reveal everything what is out there in the public domain, but I am thinking more of all kinds of aggregation!

Do we need a licence model for example, which also reflects the context in which something is published? I am absolutely not sure about this yet and just wanted to share my thoughts with you with this post. Would be great to get your feedback on this topic!

• Picture from above by Seite-3 found on Flickr

One big issues in our discussion last year regarding OpenID UX has been the question if you can really teach the mass of people, that an URL is an identifier for their identity, because this appears as an quite abstract and maybe even geeky construct in the first place.

Results of this discussion have been approaches like delegation in the OpenID2.0 spec and for example the proposal to use email-addresses instead of URL’s, to make it easier for the mass of internet users.

To be honest I also had my problems to understand that my OpenID is actually an URL as a pointer to my identity, when I discovered OpenID about two and half years ago. But since then the internet has again changed quite significantly in some respects, which now definitely support the construct of URL’s pointing to identities much more than before and will help people to understand it or to even see it as a matter of course.

Everything moves into The Cloud

Well, Cloud Computing is for sure one of the buzz words of the last years and is on the agenda of IT people already for quite some time now, but has in my eyes finally also reached the reality of the mass of internet users just “recently”.

Just take a look at yourself, dear reader: What do you have in The Cloud? I would say that having email in The Cloud is reality for most of us, even your pictures and videos are prolly to a large extend in the cloud already and of course you and your friends, your adressbooks, your diary, your travel plans, your reviews … etc. etc. etc. has moved more and more into the cloud over the last one to two years.

With that change is gets more and more obvious for a lot of internet users that URLs can point to different things of their own - to fragments of their online identity - in the cloud, because everything (more or less) which is in the cloud needs to get an URL.

In the end that’s also the case for profile pages and therefore people and therefore identities! Or to say it with the words of Max from MySpace:

90% of our users think of themselves as URLs so OpenID is a natural fit for us. (Source)

I totally agree on that. In our German Open Web Podcast we often ask ourselfs if our mom’s would understand what we are talking about - to get us down to earth when we take off into geek-wonderland - and I would say that this proof of concept is nearly reached.

Well my mom isn’t in a social network (yet), but she already has her pictures in the Cloud (sends URLs instead of burning CD-ROMs), knows that if she wants to know where her childs are and what they are up to, that “The Cloud” can tell her that (because their childs have this data already in the cloud) and when I tried to explain her over Xmas what I am working on, it wasn’t that hard anymore to explain this URL’s as identities thing, because it isn’t a new concept for her anymore to use URL’s as pointers

Now think of the recent plans of Microsoft and Apple to move their office suits (more or less) into the cloud  or just think of last years success of Netbooks, which just reflects, that people get used to have everything in The Cloud and don’t need powerfull computers anymore to run their applications or big hard-drives to store their data.

So all this indications and proceedings convince me a lot, that there won’t be a big issue with the mass of people understanding URLs as pointers to their data, identity and friends in the Cloud, in the near future.

The Open Stack as a connectivity & portability enabler

The Open Stack - and everything what you will be able to do with it in the future - will work as an enabler for connectivity & portability within this big cloud.  To work with the “cloud vs. deskotp” metaphor:

The Open Stack will enable you to create links to your already existing data in the Cloud, to let other applications or people read and maybe also write it, BUT …

… you don’t need to copy and paste everything anymore, which would finally mess up your “hard-drive”, will de-synchronize your data, will make it unclear, decline your user-experience, your efficiency, your satisfaction with the system you are working with … and will finally force you to start from scratch, format your “hard-drive”, re-install your “operating-system” and get every sorted again.

The Open Stack will provide us with technology, which enables us to link all this data intelligently together, to have it available where we want it to use, to protect it where we don’t want it to appear and to set it into relation with our social network.

So to sum it up: I think the idea of URL’s as pointers to identities is still the right direction to go and won’t die at all, because in so many other cases, people already learn that URL’s point to data, applications, corporations and also people, that’s it’s just a matter of time and maybe “market penetration” to establish a kind of “identity portability & connecitivty” based on URLs and the standards which are described as “The Open Stack.

Cloud Picture Source

I just wanna wish everybody a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thanks a lot for reading this blog, for following me on Twitter/FriendFeed and especially for all the valuable feedback you gave me on all these channels!

I think 2009 will become a very very exciting year for the Open Web and I am really looking forward to provide you with news, reviews, sreencasts, thoughts and ideas next year again!

But for now it will become pretty quite on this blog and on Twitter. I will enjoy the next - more or less internet free - days with my family and will catch up with everything else, what might happen the next two weeks, in January 2009 Stay tuned!

I recently wrote something about the future topics I will cover there and published my first ‘real’ post today: “Open is the new Black - Wie Anwender von offenen Standards profitieren” (How users profit from open standards)

So if you want to read again something in German from me … don’t hesitate to visit the myON-ID blog

One of the great Friend Connect features is to be able to stream back your activities to other social networks (or other social sites supporting activity streams) you use. The interesting aspect here is the plural! With Facebook Connect, you are limited to just one social network (Facebook), but with Friend Connect you will be able to stream you activities to several sites at the same time.

If you just jump into your “settings” on any Friend Connect site you have joined (maybe just try it now on this blog), it’s first of all important to add networks, which support this feature. Right now this is unfortunately only Plaxo as it seems, but you can expect there more for sure in the future.

After you have done that, you need to activate the feature to stream your activities back to the connected networks. (btw: you have to do the last two steps for every site separately) “Show your activity on this site to other users and friends.” is how the option is called.

To demo it I have done a comment on my own Friend Connect wall on this blog. And just seconds later … *magic* … it has shown up in my Plaxo Pulse Stream. (see the picture at the top for the Plaxo Pulse example)

So with the recent news, that also Twitter was integrated into Friend Connect this get’s very interesting! I hope that not only Twitter will support activity streaming from Friend Connect sites, but that also the option gets more details, so that you will have more possibilities to decide where you want to have streamed what activity exactly.

If you imagine that also other sites, which either already implement for example the OpenSocial Gadget API (liked LinkedIN, Hi5 etc.) or have just the same concepts (profile, friends + activities) implemented - like FriendFeed for example, will be integrated into Friend Connect, this will become really interesting for some of us.

This biggest disadvantage so far is - and that’s a general problem with Friend Connect atm - that you can only stream activities within Friend Connect Gadgets on the site. (like my Wall comment) The reason for that is, that Friend Connect not yet integrates (especially compared with Facebook Connect) very good with the host-site.

The site which integrates Friend Connect can’t interact with it and has no API (yet?), to get data in and out. (Like activities for example outside of the Friend Connect Gadget world)

But nevertheless I really like the way this was engineered by Google and I am really looking forward how this will develop. Have fun to try it with Plaxo so far

Our cooperation began already about four months ago, when I started to work for them as a freelance consultant with the task to develop a strategy how to embrace open standards and how to integrate the whole area of online identity management.

Not only the Open Stack but also topics like Distributed Social Networking, Data Portability and even Cross-Platform-Privacy are now on myON-IDs agenda and to be honest I was quite surprised to find such like-minded, forward-looking and innovative people in Germany, who share with me the same understanding and vision of the directions the web is heading towards.

Therefore it’s a great pleasure to have this opportunity and to make things happen, which I have talked about a lot in the past years on this blog and on many events.

myON-ID will change quite considerably over the next months and will get even closer, to what the name promises: a home for your online identity - build upon open standards! Stay tuned

• Official Press Release (German)
• Blog Post on the myON-ID corporate blog (German)

I have created a few mockups of something I would call “Open Connect” as a UI/UX wrap for the OpenStack, which of course remembers you instantly of Facebook Connect. Let’s just be pragmatic! 

As you can see in the mockups I also assumed that Facebook will be so nice to aggree even to a common design-pattern (well they don’t have to change a lot) even if they still wanna use their probrietary solution under the hood.

The basic ideas are really simple

So let me explain you briefly what I had in mind, when I created this mockups:

• A small pop-up is great because it keeps the user in the context of the relying party, which people want to connect to and it just doesn’t confuse due to delegation to another website.
• A small window pop-up is much better than an integrated layer due to the fishing issues. As you can see in all of my mockups users are able to proof if they are on the correct URL.
• What I really like the most about the Facebook Connect solution are the small icons with the arrows between them, explaining what happens. “Tell people what’s inside and what will happen next”. A pretty old and good usability rule every UX designer knows.
• I decided in my mockups to focus on the term “profile” instead of “identity” or whatever. I think - especially regarding due to what max from MySpace said about their users - that this is what user will understand in this context the best.
• You have two choices. Select a “Profile Provider” or enter a profile URL. The last one is of course an OpenID. But assuming that every bigger “Profile Provider” will support the OpenStack within the next 12 months (to optimistic - no ) people will just need to know their profile URL.
• The drop-down menu is something every internet users knows to use and it also scales quite well, even with pretty long lists of services, if they have an alphabetic order.
• What is also quite important to understand, is the option on the last screens. The two step process might appear once in a while, but the selection can be saved in a cookie - in general or separated for every relying party - and then it will be in the future only a one step process.

If you want to see a step by step series, click here for the OpenID URL-based showcase and here for the Provider (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MySpace etc.) delegation based showcase.

(Sorry I was so lazy and took Facebook as example for a provider. You can replace that of course also with Google, Yahoo, AOL or whoever supports the OpenStack, because the interface requirements are just the same)

So what do you think?

To make this happen there is no more technological problem to solve left! It’s “just” about all the involved parties to aggree on one design-pattern.

Ah and btw: as you can see I don’t think that email-addresses as OpenIDs will solve the problem and therefore didn’t integrated this option in the mockups. But even if the community decides, that this is the way to go - that would of course also be possbile to integrate.

Looking forward to get your feedback! Do you think this would work? Where could be the problems? Do you thinks it’s a bad idea to just adapt what Facebook has developed as a solution? I think it’s just interesting to play around with the possibilities we have to get closer to a optimal UX.

1. If you want to follow everything I do on the web. Subscribe me on FriendFeed That’s it - your are done. Skip the next steps.
2. On Twitter I tweet most of the time news and thoughts all around the Open Web. I also try to get into conversations with other people tweeting about Open Web stuff and answer questions if possbile. I am a topic focused tweeter.
3. On this blog I post my own thoughts and ideas. Sometimes news and reviews. I tend to write long and comprehensive posts here, which might take time to read. If you subscribe this blog you will also get my Bookmarks and selected Flickr Photos within the RSS-Feed
4. If you wanna add me on a social network. You can do that on Facebook, LinkedIN, Plaxo, XING or Identoo (Noserub) - the last one if you are into Distributed Social Networking.
5. On Vimeo I will publish more Screencast in the Future. Therefore feel free to add me there as friend aswell.
6. On Flickr I publish only from time to time something usefull. You can add me there, but all the interesting stuff, will be burned also into the Blog RSS-Feed.
7. For social bookmarking I am a big ma.gnolia fan, just due to their very open approach on how they build their service. I try to only add bookmarks there which might are also interesting for others. For personal review I mark stuff as private. But these bookmarks are also burned into this RSS-Feed.
8. I moved a lot of more private tweets and location-based stuff to Brightkite. I did this in the past also on Twitter, but Brightkite gives me more control over my privacy.
9. If you are interesting in my travel plans, feel free to add me on Dopplr. I keep my trips there more or less up to date.
10. Ok and if that is still not enough take a look at FriendFeed again. There are also a few more profiles listed And I also like FriendFeed a lot. So maybe just signup there and make it easier for all of us

When the quite popular German IT-news site Golem titles “Facebook Connect, the better OpenID?” and then points out, that FB Connect is able to exchange more data than OpenID and that there is a bigger advantage for website owners to support Facebook Connect, than I ask my self why …

1. Nobody (especially our investigative and professional journalists) points out, that the comparison is wrong and that you need to compare Facebook Connect with the whole Open Stack and not just OpenID. 

2. Nobody points out, that Facebook doesn’t play such an big role in Europe like in the US (and even there I would relativize it) and that due to that, this whole “versus” discussion is kind of pointless.

For website owners it only makes sense to support any kind of ” [Facebook/ Google/ Open] Connect” solution, if the majority of their user-base also maintains their social graph at one of those “Social Graph/Identity” providers. Speaking for Germany: that is neither for Facebooks Connect nor Googles Friend Connect (also with the Plaxo combo) the case yet!

Here we have much stronger social networks and also webmail-providers - where the mass of German users maintains their social graphs. Therefore everybody who wants to address German (and I would say you can transfer that for many other non-US countries) internet users, has to wait for the local-hero’s to come up with a solution.

But upon what technology will they build their solutions? Sure - first of all they need to see the demand for it - I am afraid that right now website owners in Europe will say: “Facebook is not relevant for us and OpenID seems to suck - therefore we do nothing at all” - but if they are so clever to realize that they should do also something they have two options:

1. Hey, we do it like Facebook and build our own proprietary solution and try to use our unique market position in the country we operate in to push our brand and dictate the rules.
2. We build a solution upon the OpenStack, because than it will work with much more websites, who support the OpenStack as well as a consumer

Due to what we have seen with the Facebook Applications Platform and then OpenSocial I am quite optimistic that we will see option two arising.

There are already quite a lot of social networks in Europe working on an OpenSocial support to get apps on their platforms and for those it will be just the next logical step to support the whole OpenStack and to create an kind of “Open Connect” in the end.

What I would like to see in Europe is that companies work more closely together on this issue and also start to invest money in the related foundations to build a solution which will work for everybody and also pushes - a in my eyes still to be defined - brand and/or design-pattern how to recognize a solution which will work with any “social graph/identity” provider who supports the OpenStack.

If you look at the rest of the world - outside of “Facebook-Land” - you also realize and understand much better, why it is so important to find an holistic solution approach - build on open standards - to solve the issue FB Connect addresses: we live in a very diversified world and if everybody comes up with a proprietary solution, it will be just a big mess in the end.

And dear website owners: do you really want to end up with integrating several proprietary solutions? If not maybe that’s also a good motivation to start supporting the OpenStack right now!

To sum it up: most website owners in Europe don’t need to care about what Facebook is doing. Many “social-graph/identiy” providers already implement OpenSocial. Therefore we need to invest more money to get a nice solution build upon the OpenStack. It’s about the OpenStack and not only OpenID. Journalist write off and should do better research

I think it’s a great vehicle to bring the Open Stack to website owners who don’t wanna care about programming and I hope that people who wanna care about programming also will get a chance in the future to access Friend Connect data to integrate it much better and deeper into their own websites.

What I am a bit ’surprised’ of is the fact that - prolly due to this whole “Facebook Connect vs. The Open World” discussion - journalists and bloggers quite often (speaking about the media-coverage in Germany I wanna say ‘always’) forgot to mention the remarkable feature, that now every Friend Connect enabled site can run OpenSocial Gadgets!!!

So it’s not just about the few gadgets Friend Connect offers you per default! (and a lot of people thought that is the case and therefore have said: “hey, that’s nothing real new” and compared it with MyBlogLog, SixGroups etc.)

Just take a look on your Admin-Page at the “Social Gadget” called “Custom Gadget” which asks you for an Gadget URL. Then take a look at the OpenSocial Directory - pick an gadget and copy/paste the “code” URL, which is basically the URL to the gadget specification XML file.

And in an perfect world that would be it I tried it with a few and got two running on my blog (Digg and Meebo). Others just showed me “loading” and then again others did nothing at all.

Well, OpenSocial Gadget developers will for sure now take a closer look at the Friend Connect OpenSocial container and will hopefully adapt their gadgets for Friend Connect and the typically environments in which they might appear. (i.e. weblogs) Maybe we will get even an gadget directory for Friend Connect?

I mean that are really big news - why does nobody mention it? We have now the “OpenSocial Gadgets Long-Tail” growing in the wild

XING - the most popular business network in Germany and other european countries - announced about one year ago to become an OpenSocial container. This year in september they showed first mockups at the Google Developer Day 2008 in Munich, to illustrate where and how Apps could be integrated into XING and announced that OpenSocial will be launched in the first half of 2009. (here are the slides - jump to slide 62!)

At the Google Developer Day they also announced the “OpenSocial Developer Pitch 2008″, which is about getting into contact with developers who want to hand in concept proposals and mockups regarding their ideas about OpenSocial Apps, which they would want to write/adapt for XINGs OpenSocial platform.

I talked with Matthias Häsel - Technical Product Manager - about the Pitch yesterday on the phone and he pointed out, that it is an important requirement for apps to fit into the context of a business network and to enhance/improve the platform with features which provide a real added-value to their customers.

Therefore don’t expect any Vampire like apps to appear on XING some day, but I can imagine quite a bunch of interesting apps, which improve the usefullness of the XING platform in it’s business context.

It’s very nice to see in general some progress at German social network sites like XING and Lokalisten regarding OpenSocial and with two big German SNS partcipating in OpenSocial I think it will get also quite interesting for more and more German developers to take a closer look at how OpenSocial works. (btw the next Openweb Podcast episode will be an introduction into OpenSocial - so stay tuned)

In this Screencast (click here for high quality quicktime version) I tried to explain what “Distributed Social Networking” is all about. I talk shortly about the building blocks of social networking in general, then point out where the problem is and show you with Noserub how a Distributed Social Network can work.

This screencast doesn’t go to much into technical details and has the objective to make people understand quickly, what it’s all about.

Here a few related links:
noserub.com
identoo.com
diso-project.org

I am looking forward to receive your feedback! This was my first screencast I have ever done and as you might hear, I am not used to speak english every day

Is there anything you would like to add? Tweet it @pixelsebi or leave a comment!

EDIT: due to a comment on Twitter: Those who have a better understanding of OpenID of course know that all this reasons are not totally covered by OpenID alone, but together with other standards. But I think if you tell a non-technical person, what OpenID can offer him, he doesn’t need to know the details and you would just confuse him, with what is going on in the backbround, to make that happen.

• Comment-Aggregation with OpenID and Two-Way-Discovery
• Distributed Open Social
• The Missing Profile Page
• My OpenID idea regarding my new profile
• Contact browsing in a distributed social network

I have recently sat down in a bar in Berlin together with a friend of mine, who was also quite active during the last two to three years in virtual worlds, and we both agreed on the point, that the whole metaverse thing will not really take off, before we have better interfaces for it, than a “normal” computer.

If you have taken a look at the definition of the metaverse (here is a German podcast about it), which was done by the metaverse roadmap project, you already know that augmented reality and lifelogging are two of four areas of the metaverse.

Speaking of interfaces as success factor for a wide adoption, we are much closer to anything related to augmented reality, than to mirror or virtual worlds in my eyes. God bless the iPhone and G1

Augmented Reality

Well, the idea of augmented reality has of course been around now for a while and a search on Youtube for that term can be quite entertaining. You will see people with giant head-mounted displays and heavy backpacks (for the computer) walking around. Take a look at this movie for example:

The usage scenario in this movie was a sightseeing tour, where the reality was mashed up with overlays, showing how it looked like in this town in the past and they also overlayed movies so that you could be part of small historic events.

Well, but wearing this massive equipment is not really comfortable/practicable and due to the problem, that the technology still has a big problem with synchronizing your moves with what is shown within the HMD in real-time, it still causes people to throw up after a while due to the small lag between reality and augementation

But we are in the lucky situation that more and more people have devices like the iPhone or the G1, which have the following technologies integrated:

• a (more or less) big display
• a camera on the other side of the display
• pretty fast access to the internet
• GPS modul for geo-locating
• motion sensors for tracking movements

Well, that’s a pretty nice combination to build augmented reality applications, isn’t it? Of course it’s not as immersive as the head-mounted displays, but it’s in the pockets of a growing amount of people, this technology get’s cheaper and cheaper and augmented reality applications can be really really useful and improve your real-life experience! (the last argument is prolly the most important!)

Compared again with virtual worlds: they are far more away from being easy accessible and usable for everybody, they have far less useful use-cases and as long you can’t plugin your brain into a - then full immersive - virtual world, they will also not convince the mass of people.

To give you an example of how augmented reality can work, take a look at the following two videos. The first shows nicely how the sightseeing usecase from above can be transfered on the G1 and the second one shows the classic 3D objects scenario.

With the newest iPhone update, now also every iPhone user has the Google Streetview on his phone, which is also a nice base to build augmented reality applications upon it.

To close this small general introduction into augmented reality let’s take a last look at what the genial designer Mac Funamizu envisions as an future device for augmented reality. Here just a few picks - you find more of his concept studies on his great blog petinvention.

I know what you think now: Where can I buy it? #fanboy - Well, I am sure it will still take some time until we have such gorgeous devices, but if you take the growing netbook market into account and therefore a general trend to small and light devices, wich have about a 7” to 9” - maybe even touchscreen - display, with a build in camera, build-in 3G maybe also GPS soon - there will be such an interface for sure

But what has this all in common with Lifelogging and the Open Web?

If we start using devices like the iPhone or G1 for augmented reality it of course also makes sense to mashup lifelogging-data in these interfaces, which we have available from our social network! Let me give you a few examples:

• showing reviews of your friends at places where your are
• showing digital “foot-prints” of your friends
• showing pictures, comments or other media, people have created at places
• contact people, show them what you see and let them display more data 

I am pretty sure that we will see for example an Brightkite and Google Streetview mashup pretty soon, so that when you are at a place, you can move around you G1 and will see data overlays by people you know.

Or look at the last picture above with the sofa: why not also overlay product reviews and comments from your social network, who already bought it and left an review on their blog, Amazon or any other review site? Or maybe call your girldfriend and let her make a few color adjustment, before you buy something totally wrong?

Imagine you are at a museum and point your device in the direction of a work of art and you not only get funky 3D overlays with more information, but also see who of your friends have looked at is aswell and maybe left a small video or audio comment, to share their thoughts and feelings regarding this work of art?

An augmented reality will benefit massively from becoming “social” as well, which means nothing else, that you can pull in the data about your social graph and access their data based on location and context. And that’s simply the reason why what we do within the realm of the open web is also interesting for augmented reality.

People need to own their data, need to be able to aggregate and forward it however they like, to build such awesome “social” augmented reality applications for the future. For example take a look at the last post I wrote about comment-aggregation with OpenID. We need that to be able to track and mash those conversations on other devices, in other contexts and other locations!

Feel free to add questions or other ideas for this episode in our wiki! The episode will be recorded at 19:00  on thursday the 27th november. We will broadcast live on Ustream.tv! Until then - follow us on Twitter or Join our Network on Mixxt. You can find our podcast on iTunes of course!

Mensch da ist mir heute morgen ja beinahe der Kaffee über die Tastatur gekippt, als ich den Artikel auf Werbeblogger über mich gesehen haben. Vielen Dank Patrick für diese unerwarteten Blumen! Anbei eine kurze Orientierung für neue Besucher auf diesem Blog:

• Meine Themen: Open Web, Semantic Web, Social Media und Virtuelle Welten
• Ich blogge und tweete seit ca. Juni fast nur noch auf Englisch
• Ich podcaste aber weiterhin fast ausschließlich in Deutsch
• Seit wenigen Wochen gibt es auch den Open Web Podcast
• Im Moment geht es hier überwiegend um das Thema Open Web / Data Portability

Folgende Artikel wurden in der Vergangenheit im Übrigen häufig gelesen:

• The Future of Corporate Websites
• The South African Blogosphere
• Wozu braucht man eigentlich noch Second Life
• Das Open Web Business/Advertising Modell
• podcast#26 - What is the Metaverse?
• podcast#27 - Mobile Tagging

I was quite surprised when I read the article on ReadWriteWeb about Typepad Connect, in which they suggested that the new Typepad profile page, would be a good endpoint for an OpenID and that it could be a step towards a distributed social web - but shouldn’t that be done in a slightly different way?

Don’t we just need a Two-Way-Discovery to solve the Problem?

In my eyes it all starts with the topic discovery - but this time the other way round: If you use your OpenID right now, the Identitiy Provider can tell the Consumer (via XRDS-Simple), what kind of data and services are also associated with this OpenID - apart from just the OpenID endpoint.

While signing in with an OpenID you could point for example to a Portable Contacts API of the user, to import contacts from there or you could also point to a comprehensive list of your accounts you provide via the Microformat XFN on your blog.

What if that happens also the other way round? If in the same process also the consumer tells the provider, what kind of data and services are now - due to the usage via the OpenID - available? The identity provider - who maintains a kind of history of your logins and therefore sites you use anyway - could simply store this informaton about available data and services, and make it available for you to use it directly or re-share it again with other services, where you use your OpenID.

The Comment-Aggregation with an OpenID Example

To come back to my headline with an example of what I have described above: There is already a plugin for Wordpress available which enables readers of your blog to identify themselves via their OpenID. Now let`s extend this plugin with a few more features!

In the moment when somebody uses his OpenID to leave a comment, the plugin creates a simple RSS-Feed for comments related to this OpenID.

This feed includes all comments created with this OpenID and also the replies of others in relation to them.

During the verification process the “Two-Way-Discovery” makes sure, that the identity provider gets the information (via XRDS-Simple again), that this feed is now available for this OpenID and stores the information.

And that’s basically it! You now have more or less the same possibilities, as you have with Disqus or Typepad Connect. You can aggregate all your comments / discussions in one place and make them available to others in for example an activity stream.

The big advantages are:

• the blog owner doesn’t need to decide which service he wants to integrate and is therefore independent.
• the blog owner just supports open standards like OpenID, XRDS and RSS instead of a proprietary third-party owned solutions.
• the user doesn’t need to commit himself to one of these services and is therefore independent as well
• the user can choose an interface/service of his choice to visualize the data (in this case his comments/discussion) and get features build around this data he is collecting with thee usage of this OpenID

I think that’s a fairly simple and easy solution. This solution btw also doesn’t eleminates the need for services like Disqus or Typepad Connect. They could just build in a support for getting the data of peoples identity providers instead of collecting them on their own And - what is also important(!) - it also of course not only works with comments!

It’s a holistic solution approach for all different kind of data

As you might know right now it’s really a pain in the ass to add the accounts you have over and over again at new service you sign up for. It’s getting pretty close to the same game we have with adding contacts again and again.

With the solution above - OpenID consumers telling the Identity Providers which data and service are associated with the usage of the OpenID on their plattform - everything becomes much more convenient and intelligent.

Also for the aggregation-service who wants to integrate und use different data-streams from other accounts, it could change the situation. Right now all the implementations are build on the circumstance that the aggregation-service needs to find out manually, which feeds are available of a user for every new service which might get popular - they need to add every service manually - scales not so good

With an - how ever implemented - Two-Way-Discovery process there would be an “Auto-Discovery” for that and the identity provider is always up to date and forwards this information to all services the OpenID owner uses.

At the end let’s get back to what I am planning on my own blog: I just want to have this aggregated comments / discussions on my own site, without the detour over a special comment-aggregator service, but just directly via my identity provider, who simply knows what I do already and who could also know, which data these sites make available.

What do you think?

In the comments there came up the question if it also would make sense to become an OpenSocial container if you are not one of the big social network players and if it would be possible to monetize that as well?

In this context I played around with the thought if it wouldn’t make sense to think about distributed opensocial environments? When we think about distributed social networks it would be just one of the next logical steps, to also make OpenSocial applications work within those.

As example: I have published in this article a first draft of a new profile page I wanna have on pixelsebi.com - which will work with those distributed social networking approaches. Why not have also applications integrated there as well?

So wouldn’t it be possible to make Noserub an OpenSocial container? Wouldn’t it be possible to have an OpenSocial Wordpress plugin, which enables me to run OpenSocial apps on my blog, if it supports DiSo anyway?

I think this absolutely makes sense and is nothing which is impossible to achieve. Will blog more about that for sure

Wie oft habe ich schon Sätze über Dinge aus dem Open Web Umfeld von Webseiten Betreibern gehört, die sich ungefähr wie folgt anhören:

Ach mit OpenID, OpenSocial und Co. kann man doch kein Geld verdienen! Ganz im Gegenteil: erstmal sind das Kosten die uns direkt nichts einbringen.

Finden wir gut und ist zwar ‘Nice-To-Have’ aber im Moment nicht unser Fokus. Im Moment konzentrieren wir uns erstmal auf alles wo auch Revenue hinter steht.

Wir arbeiten gerade an Monetization Geschichten und müssen solche Spielereien hinten anstellen.

Alles was mit mit Open Web zu tun hat, macht also erstmal Arbeit, bringt keine Einnahmen (macht die Investoren nicht glücklich) und ist sowie mehr so eine Geek-Spielerei, die eigentlich keiner braucht.

Während man also das Them”Open Web” erstmal links liegen lässt beschäftigt man sich lieber damit mehr Werbung auf die Plattform zu bekommen. Schliesslich wollen die Nutzer die ja auch so gerne sehen, klicken da vor allem auch so unwahrscheinlich häufig drauf und finden das auch total gut, dass man ihre ganzen Daten die sie so hinterlassen dazu verwendet, sie angemessener zu beschallen

Das im Moment selbst die ganz großen Pageimpression Schleudern massiv Probleme haben ihren Traffic auch vermarket zu bekommen, interessiert dabei erstmal keinen. Bei StudiVZ versucht man es mal fix auf das schlechte Image abzuschieben - blos nicht das Geschäftsmodel Werbung an sich in Frage stellen.

Aber was wäre wenn man auch mit Investitionen ins Open Web letzten Endes Geld verdienen könnte?

Facebook denkt mal wieder vor

So gerne ich auch Facebook Bashing betreibe - denn man kann aus vielen Gründen auch schlecht über FB reden - so sehr muss man auch einfach eingestehen, dass dort Leute sitzen, die wirklich vorrausdenken und gerade auch das “Open Web” vorrantreiben, dadurch dass Facebook immer wieder Ideen hat (wie die Öffnung für Applikationen, wie die Einführung von Facebook Connect) die insgesamt den Markt verändern und auch die Open Web Gemeinde antreiben, das ganze auch mit offenen Standards zu ermöglichen.

Nachdem nun FB die eigene App Plattform stark mit dem Relaunch “eingedampft” hatte und für Entwickler eigentlich unattraktiver gemacht hat - so dass Scott Rafer z.B. sagt: “The Facebook Platform is Dead” - bieten sie nun wieder Features an, die es ermöglichen Apps prominenter einzubinden und wieder aktiver innerhalb der Plattform bekannt zu machen. Und dies gegen ein Entgeld. (mehr dazu im Detail bei Netzwertig und Techcrunch)

Was Facebook da macht ist nichts anderes wie den Zugang zu der eigenen Plattform gegenüber Dritten zu vermarkten, welche nunmal stark davon profiteren können, dass Facebook Zugriff auf so enorm viele Nutzer und deren Social Graph bieten kann.

Ich teile da auch Marcels Meinung, dass so ein Modell auch durchaus auf Facebook Connect (und damit auch auf OpenID plus Anhang) ausgeweitet werden könnte. Und wie hat Tim O’Reilly noch bei der Eröffnung der Web2.0Expo gesagt: “Diejenigen die die Daten kontrollieren werden die Gewinner sein” (ganz freie eigene Wiedergabe)

Kann nur Facebook so agieren?

Die Frage ist jetzt natürlich, ob nur Facebook durch seine einzigartige Marktposition so agieren kann und allein dadurch in der Lage ist die Offenheit seiner Plattform zu vermarkten. Ich denke nicht. Nur muss besonders in Deutschland erstmal einfach mehr in Richtung Plattform gedacht werden!

Schliesslich gibt es viele Gatekeeper für Daten über den Social Graph in unterchiedlichen Ländern, für unterschiedliche Zielgruppen etc. - Den Zugriff auf diese Daten zu vermarkten und auch die Möglichkeit (via OpenSocial) Dritte in die eigene Platform zu integrieren gibt es viele.

Was hier vielleicht auch nochmal hilft - um nicht zu sehr um die Ecke denken zu müssen - Apps einfach als Werbung zu sehen. Liebe Werbetreibenden da draussen: Lasst doch eure Hockey-Sticks einfach mal in der Ecke stehen und baut nette “Social-Apps” für mich, die mir entweder einen Nutzen bieten oder mich wenigsten auf spielerische Art und Weise unterhalten.

Letzten Endes muss ich natürlich zugeben, dass das jetzt nicht wahnsinnig was neues ist. Spätestens seit dem UPS Widget mit Namen “Widget” dürfte ja klar sein, dass hier eine Möglichkeit für Werbetreibende besteht Applikationen in der Kommunikation zu nutzen.

Letzten Endes haben wir hier natürlich in Deutschland erstmal ein Henne und Ei Problem. Wo keine Plattform da auch keine Social-Apps der Werbetreibenden. Aber wenigsten die Lokalisten scheinen hier ja aus dem Knick zu kommen und werden damit einer der ersten Plattformen, auf denen etwas ähnliches möglich sein sollte.

Mal ein paar Beispiele:

• Vielleicht eine Vampire-Applikation, die von einem Kostümverleih programmiert wurde?
• Virtuelle Blumengrüße mit einer Applikation, die von Fleurop erstellt worden ist?
• Gemeinsame Bahnfahrten mit einer Applikation planen, die von der Deutschen Bahn erstellt wurde?
• Den nächsten familiären Konzertbesuch mit einer Applikation abwickeln, die von Eventim erstellt wurde?
• Der “Carbon-Footprint-Battle” mit einer Applikation von den Grünen?
• Die Lotto zahlen einfach von den Freunden tippen lassen, mit einer App von Tipp24?
• Zur nächsten DSDS Staffel eine schicke App um den eigenen Liebling zu promoten?
• Eine “Ich trage heute folgendes Makeup” App von Niva Visage vielleicht?
• Kostenlos SMS an die eigenen Freunde schicken, mit der App von O2?

Ich denke der Kreativität sind da keine Grenzen gesetzt. Und dass man für solche Apps einfach mal Geld verlangt, damit sie auf der eigenen Plattform laufen, halte ich für absolut nachvollziehbar.

Und ich als Anwender wäre wirklich happy weniger Wallpaper und Hockey-Sticks ertragen zu müssen und dafür lieber ein paar mehr oder weniger praktische Apps bekomme.

Also: auf der nächsten OMD gibt es dann eine “Open Social Lounge”, ok?

[ENGLISH] This is one of the first podcasts I transfer from my Tumblr on this blog and into my podcast feed, which I have recorded during the Berlin Web Week.

In the context of my last (German) podcast about XING vs. Facebook and my article about my changed social network usage I think it makes sense to start with Scott Rafers talk at the Facebook Developer Garage: “The Facebook Plattform is Dead” - which was btw the best talk at the FDG at all

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[GERMAN] Short notice for english speaking visitors:

This podcast and blog post is in German. In this episode I compare the two social networks XING (popular business focused social network from Germany) and Facebook. The reason for this is, that about two years ago I was a quite active XING user, but now Facebook totally dominates my social networking experiences. I try to explain the reason why.

In diesem Podcast gehe ich darauf ein wie aus einem recht begeisterten XING Nutzer ein aktiver Facebook Nutzer geworden ist. Für mich hat sich in den letzten zwei Jahren die Situation vollkommen verändert und XING hat für mich nur noch die Funktion dass ich dort auch sichtbar bin, um weiterhin gefunden zu werden. 

Es ist aber für mich längst nicht mehr das zentrale “Dreh- und Angepunkt-Network” was es mal gewesen ist. Facebook konnte hier durch seine Internationalität, dem kostenlosen Geschäftsmodell, dem offenen (offen liegt dabei sehr im Auge des Betrachters) Plattform Ansatz und durch zahlreiche kluge Features ganz klar an XING vorbeiziehen und für mich als Anwender Mehrwerte schaffen, die ich bei XING einfach nicht bekomme, obwohl man dort sogar als Premium Nutzer zur Kasse gebeten wird.

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Connections

XING plays a special role for me, because it’s a German company and was the first big social network here at all. Therefore it’s no surprise that I have the most connections on Xing (377) followed by Facebook (257) and LinkedIN (185) at the end. But that doesn’t mean at the moment, that I know the most people on XING.

Due to the fact, that I can’t export my contacts (no premium user) from XING to find them also on Facebook and LinkedIN, it’s a bit more complicated to synchronize connections between the networks - and all my international contacts are most of the time not registered for XING at all.

In Germany it’s still most probable that you first connect on XING, because you are pretty sure, that you will find somebody there. But I have noticed within the last year that the majority of people within my area of business also seem to maintain their profiles on Facebook and LinkedIN. I would assume that the biggest intersection of contacts will be at Facebook right now.

Due to these reasons I tend to start searching for new connections first on Facebook and just use XING as a fallback if I can’t find them. LinkedIN I do not maintain additionally yet.

Messaging and Chat

I have also noticed that my usage of the messaging services has moved to more than 90% to Facebook. The main reason for that might be, that’s it’s free of charge and that XING requires me to be a premium member, to do that. (LinkedIN is free as well)

I not only send messages primarily via Facebook (because I just can’t do that on XING) I also receive about ten times more messages on Facebook than on XING from my connections. LinkedIN doesn’t play any role in messaging yet for me.

I also recognize that quite a few people seem to be (more or less) permanently loggedin on the Facebook website and therefore it happens more and more often, that we use the instant messaging feature of Facebook to communicate quickly.

Groups and Forums

On Facebook I am the member of 44 groups, on XING I am member of 9 groups and on LinkedIN I haven’t joined any group yet.

But XING is still the only place where I write or read something from time to time within the forums of a group seriously. Being in a group on Facebook is more an act of self-expression, than really interacting with people. I have never had a real discussion within a Facebook group.

I would assume that here the language-factor comes into play: discussions on XING are in German and therefore it’s still easier and more convenient for me to be active there from time to time.

Livestreaming and Status Updates

Livestreaming is hard to compare because XING and LinkedIN just don’t offers that and only show activities on their platforms in a stream. Therefore it doesn’t play any role.

I have my Twitter account and Facebook connected with each other, so that tweets change my status on Facebook and what is pretty interesting to see is, that I get more and more replies on tweets via comments on Facebook instead of answers on Twitter. I would say that every thrid or fourth reply on a tweet happens on Facebook.

What also makes this livestreaming aspect of Facebook really usefull for me, that I can discover new thing on Facebook via my contacts in the livestream. On XING it has never happened yet to me, that I have discovered anything interesting.

Applications and the Platform Factor

Well, XING is out of the game, because even if they have announced support for OpenSocial a year ago we haven’t seen anything yet. LinkedIN recently added support for OpenSocial, but only supports a few applications yet.

Facebook is here still the place to be and every once in a while a application catches my attention, which makes me spending quite a lot of time in my breaks on Facebook After the relaunch of Facebook and introducing the “application-bar” at the bottom of the screen, Facebooks feels more and more like a platform, what I personally like.

Especially “Facebook Connect” makes Facebook even more attractive for me - preconditioned there will be a wide adoption in the future - because the convenience-factor really makes a huge difference. I tried it already on several sites, who support it (for example myBarackObama.com) and it works really smooth and having my contacts with me on every website I use is great.

My Conclusions

First of all: I haven’t taken all factors into account. For example events and picture-sharing. But that doesn’t apply to me, because I use specialized services for that and don’t do that on social networks sites at all.

In the end I have to say, that Facebook really gained a huge amount of traffic from me over the last two years and that XING has directly lost this traffic in my case. The reasons for that are:

• biggest intersection of connections goes to Facebook, because …
• … most of my German connections are also there
• … and my international connections aren’t at XING
• Facebook is totally free for me and …
• … XING has way to much restrictions as a non-premium member
• … therefore messaging and search moved to Facebook

And the most important reason: Facebook is far more usefull for me and still works on improving this with Facebook Connect and the whole platform approach.

I will of course still maintain my XING profile, so that people can find me there, but I don’t use the service XING anymore, as I might have done it in the past. I maintain a LinkedIN profile as well, but just for the “because it’s nice to have and might be relevant some time” reason. How about you?

The Grid now has launched an nice “Geo-Tagged Documentary”, which explores youth culture in Soweto and this is a very nice example for how you can use location-based services in publishing and/or marketing content:

Mobikasi utilises The Grid’s LBS (location-based service) capabilities to tag real-life physical locations and link them to relevant documentary content.

Users can explore Sowetan youth culture on their cellphones from anywhere in South Africa through The Grid’s map interface, or by physically touring the famous township and watching documentary clips on their phones at the locations where they were shot.

Watch the movie above, which is the official trailer. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any videos yet, where somebody demonstrates it on his phone.

(via)

If you understand German join our Open Web Podcast network on Mixxt (btw: it supports OpenID). You of course can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and via RSS.

I’am focused in this post on Wordpress and NoseRub, due to the fact, that I have the most experiences with both. But I am pretty sure, that you can also do it with other blogging systems and that it will also work with what the DiSo Project is working on.

How does Distributed Social Networking work in general?

The basic idea is fairly simple: You and your friends don’t need to be anymore within one (closed) social network, to be able to connect to each other, but everybody can use his platform of choice and you can connect to your friend regardless which platform they are using.

So in the future that could mean at some point, that a Xing user for example can add friends to his network, even if this friends aren’t Xing users at all, but for example MySpace users or even just host their profile by themselfs on their own website - as I plan it right now.

That will work if everybody opens up and is committed to use the same open standards for distributed social networking. Of course this is a vision right now and projects like NoseRub and the DiSo Project are working on this vision and build implementations for it, to show how it can work and to get the ball rolling.

NoseRub has coded a PHP/MySQL building block, which you can download and run on your own server, or you can also signup at Identoo.com - which is an example installation of NoseRub - and DiSo works on a Wordpress Plugin implementation of this vision. There are already plugins available, but - as Will pointed out in the comments on this blog earlier - they are still work in progress and will be available via the official Wordpress plugin site as soon they are finalized.

If you like the idea in general and would like to participate with your own Wordpress Blog already - read on my dear!

What do I need to do, to get it running?

The short answer is: provide your own profile, list of services you use and list of contacts you have on your own blog and mark this stuff up with Microformats. That’s it for now But how to do that, if you have no idea of Microformats? No Problem at all. Wordpress has nearly everything you need already build in from the start.

1. List of your contacts

First of all you just create a simple link in your Wordpress blog for every contact you wanna have listed as one of your friends publicly. Enter his name and a link to his profile. What makes sense here is to think about where you wanna link to.

If you know, that he maybe also supports the idea of Distrubted Social Networking link to his Identity-URL! That is the URL where he provides his data. Otherwise maybe link to a public profile of him elsewhere. In this example I link to Matthias own NoseRub installation, which he runs under pfefferle.org.

All this contacts you add should have the same category. The name of the category will be used as headline in the sidebar for those links. So maybe chose something like “My Contacts” or whatever

But that’s not all! Very important is now, that you scroll down a bit and define your relationship to this contact, with the interface Wordpress offers you. Because that is now the point, where you markup the link with the Microformat XFN, without needing to know how it works exactly.

If you have done that, you are fine and can save the link. Yeah I know. If you have “a few” contacts this is painful work and of course in the future there will be solutions, to easily important contacts. But for now you are an early adopter and need to some things manual

2. List of your accounts

The next thing you wanna do is to add a list of services you are using. Well the nice thing about this list of contacts and accounts is - that you maybe already have those list in your sidebar, but just not marked-up with Microformats yet. Adding your accounts works exactly the same as a contact.

You add a new link, you choose/create another category for it, for example “MyAccounts” and finally you also scroll down and this time you just need to select the option:”another web address of mine” to indicate, that this links points to one of your accounts.

If you have done this with all your accounts you wanna show the public of you, your finsihed with that and now it’s time to add data about your person.

3. Data about your person

Adding data about your person needs to be available as well. At least your full-name and a picture should be available. Everything else is on top Unfortunately that’s not yet directly build in into Wordpress and so so you need to copy & paste some code into your sidebar.

To do that switch to the “Design” tab and select “Widgets” and add a “Text” Widget to your Sidebar. In this Text-Field you need to copy & paste an hCard. To create an hCard maybe just use this simple hCard-Creator.

If you have also done this: Congratulations! Your Wordpress Blog is now NoseRub Compatible! To illustrate you, how this can look like in a very simple way, I have set up an example blog, where I have done exactly the last three steps: http://pixelsebi.wordpress.com

But what does it mean, that your Blog is now NoseRub compatible? That means that you can now use your Blog URL as an “Identity-URL” and people who are using NoseRub can now:

• use this URL to add you as an friend
• see your name and picture within NoseRub
• see all the accounts you use within NoseRub
• see your activities on these accounts in the NoseRub Lifestream

And there is another pretty awesome new possibility you now have created. If applications - like for example Communipedia - make use of Google’s Social Graph API, they will find your accounts and contacts as well, if you provide them with just your Identity-URL, because the Social Graph API is also build upon Microformats.

How does this now look like in NoseRub?

To illustrate you, what this means now for an NoseRub user, I have also done some screenshot on Identoo. (Identoo is a NoseRub based Social Network Application) I first of all added a new contact in Identoo by just pointing to my demo-blog “Identity-URL” http://pixelsebi.wordpress.com

After that all the data which we have just made available in the three steps before can be used and a new contact will be added to my contact list on Identoo:

As you see the picture, name and URL was added and Identoo now also knows the accounts of this person.

Therefore the activities of this person will now also been shown in the Identoo Lifestream View.

Next steps - that’s just the beginning!

So that are of course just a very few basic steps towards a Distrubted Social Network. Issues like messaging, groups, private data and privacy haven’t yet been solved with this solution. More over at the moment NoseRub really requires you to have all this data in one place, directly available under the “Identity-URL” you provide.

What will be an important next step is to add discovery via XRDS and a solid FoaF support. With a working “Discovery” I then could for example take into account to not provide all this informations in the sidebar of my blog, but on an separated “profile”-page, where I have an comprehensive hCard displayed and a comprehensive list of accounts and contacts, which now would make my sidebar a bit messy.

NoseRub then first looks at i.e. http://pixelsebi.com for the data and gets the info, that the data - which NoseRub is looking for - is available under http://pixelsebi.com/profile/.

Another good thing by the way would be to have a nice button which displays if a weblog is “NoseRub Compatible”

I think - apart from the fact, that we will hopefully have this Wordpress plugins provided by the DiSo Project soon - that this article could help you to learn more about Distributed Social Networks and that it makes you curious to play a little bit more around with NoseRub, Diso and your Blog!

One interesting part which this covers is maintaing your own list of contacts and make them accessible via an interface to your visitors. So far you can see on my very first draft, that I included a small box on my profile, which shows aggregated contacts from different platforms.

How are contacts implemented in a distributed social network?

Let’s now forget for a second this contact aggregation issue I have raised in the wireframe above (that’s another topic) and focus and what would be needed in an ideal distributed social network environment.

Both - DiSo and NoseRub right now work with a list of contacts, which can be done with FoaF or directly visible on the website marked up with hCard and XFN.

This contact list is nothing more than a list of names, an URL to this person and a few attributes to describe the relationships between you and this contact. The URLs (in an ideal environment) will point to the profile pages of my contacts, where they again provide:

• informations about themselves (marked up with hCard and/or FoaF)
• informations about their contacts (marked up with hCard/XFN and/or FoaF)
• informations about services they use on the web (with XFN and rel=”me” and/or FoaF)

With this easy construct you create a distributed social network environment for public data (privacy and sharing private data between contacts is NOT covered by that!)

How should the interface look like?

If you look at it, how the early adopters do it, you will find nothing else than a blogroll like list of contacts in a sidebar of a blog. If you click on the link you will get to the page of the contact.

But I think that’s just a minimal interface to show that it works in general, but not what the average user will expect it to be. The question I am asking myself now is:

At which point do I delegate a user to website of my contact and how much of his data do I display by myself on my site?

I just put together quickly a wireframe which is maybe exactly the opposite of the “blogroll-approach” - I just display every information I can access and create a profil for him on my site. If that makes sense is the question I wanna raise here? So I’ve put this wireframe together to illustrate it and make it easier to understand.
 

If you haven’t seen my first draft of my new profile page, take a look here first maybe, to understand the context. So what have I done in this wireframe?

1. Contact Browser

I just put a (still crappy and yet not well considered) contact-brwoser at the top of the screen to access a list of my contacts. You see it here in an expanded version. Click here vor a collapsed version. You can shuffle through the profile pictures and/or you create a filter to narrow down the contacts, by selecting attributes.

This attributes are just the same, as I use with XFN/FoaF to describe the relationship. If that makes sense and/or if the XFN attributes are good in general is another question.

If you have found the person in my contacts you are interested in, just click on him and details will be displayed below.

2. Contact Details

Well, this wireframe of course works with the assumption, that all my contacts are part of a distributed social network and that all of them - otherwise this wouldn’t work - have their data marked up and/or available via FoaF.

What I have shown now is that I can of course access all this data and display it on my own website:

• I show data about him (which I got via hCard or FoaF)
• I show a lifestream of him, because I know all the services he uses (they are marked up with XFN/hCard and/or FoaF)
• I show his list of contacts (which I also got via XFN and/or FoaF)

I just pack all these things together and wrap it into a interface, which meets the design and user experience of my site. But is that really what we want?

Which context needs which Interface?

I would assume that this depends on the context and the service you are using at that moment. On a website, which shall be nothing else than a blog, a simple list of contacts with links to their profiles might be just fine.

A website, which is much more like my personal online identity on web - which will be the future positioning of my site after the relaunch - maybe should have an another interface, which also already pulls in some data and displays it directly. But I think I have overdone it a bit in this wireframe and it should be more reduced and even simpler

But - there will of course also be services in this distributed social network environment which are more than that and where it will absolutely makes sense to display all the information available and wrap it into a typical profile page, because this service wants to offer this typical social networking experience.

So … what do you think? 

At which point do I delegate a user to website of my contact and how much of his data do I display by myself on my site?

What would be your answer to that questions? What are your ideas? I will publish more variations of wireframes to illustrate a few more approaches over the next days I think. Would love to get your freedback.

Today I stumpled across Storytlr, which is a really nice service, developed by two guys from Belgium & The Netherlands, which had the great idea to enable you to pack your little pieces of online activities together into small stories.

What you basically do is to plugin in your online activities (like on FriendFeed), then you get a “standard” profile page with an activity stream of you (exmaple 1, example 2) and the great thing is, that you then can put together stories based on a timefrime and activities you wanna inlcude in the story. (example).

Here is also a nice screencast of how Storytlr works. It’s open for registration btw!

One of the central ideas is, to make this profile page also dynamically, depending on the person who is looking at it. (like it works on a “normal” social networking site) This person will be identified by his OpenID - and that exactly is the reason why there is this “Who are you?” box in the center of the screen.

Due to the fact that we have so many people now, who have potentially an OpenID - and because the chance is high that most of my friends are early adopters, who will also understand what it is - I think it makes sense, to actually implement something based on that.

The Basic idea

The basic idea is fairly easy to describe: you tell me who you are and if I know you I will show you more details about me on the public profile. For example an extended version of my contact-details (detailed private address, private mobile number, birthdate etc.), my lifestream on the profile page could include a few more items and maybe I even show you my exact location (and not just city) on my profile via Brightkite.

What is important for me, that it doesn’t has the user experience of a login or registration, but the user experience of answering just an easy question: Who are you? - I am <enter your openid here> - At the moment I see several ways of implementing this.

Manual Whitelist

This is the fairly easy but of course uncool and not an ideal solution: I just create a manual whitelist in which I enter the OpenIDs of my friends and if you tell me who you are and after verifing this information you get more details about me if you are on the whitelist.

But that doesn’t scales well and even means quite a lot of manual work for me. I would need to ask everybody for his OpenID and than I would need to maintain this list. And: we are already connected on so many platforms, so why don’t check them if we know us?

The OAuth, OpenSocial, Portable Contacts Approach

Well, we are now in the lucky situation that more and more services implement OpenSocial REST API’s together with OAuth and the whole Open Stack stuff. So I could just simply ask these services if we already know us!

For that I would request your email-adress and your full name within the OpenID process - when you tell me who you are the first time - and I could then simply request my contact lists from other services to check if we are connected elsewhere. If that’s the case, maybe it will be enough information for me to show you a few more details about me.

To make that possbile I would need to have an application running on my server (best thing would be to have it directly as a wordpress plugin with a nice front-end) which I have granted access to these API’s via OAuth before. This application then just requests a list of contacts via the API and I can validate if we already know us elsewhere. If that’s the case - my profile pages changes for you!

Well, this is just another basic step to make it work better. But this still wouldn’t make me feel comfortable to show you all my personal data, because just knowing you elsehwere, doesn’t mean that I trust you

Additonally there is also a secruity problem here: anybody could create an OpenID, which tells me any email and full name combination. So I don’t really know, if you are really the one, who you claim to be. To validate this I would maybe have three different choices:

1. your OpenID provider is also your email provider and can guarantee me, that you are the owner of the email-address (like Google could)
2. maybe the Social Graph API could help to find out if your OpenID is “mentioned” elsewhere together with your name and email
3. I send you an email to your email-address to validate - but no: that’s an unbeatifull solution and the user experience would be lame. not smooth enough - it’s then really like a registration at a website and not like “tell me who you are” any more

What I basically need is a proof that the email-address is right. I am not sure at the moment, if this can be guaranteed by “normal” OpenID providers, because as I know it, you can manually change the data you transmit within the process. So then even an email validation on the provider side, doesn’t help me. But maybe we will see a small change here?

Privacy inheritance from other services

So what I would need to feel more comfortable with what I show my visitors - and let’s take as example Brightkite and Flickr here - are API’s which let me make more detailed contact-list requests. Could I ask Brightkite for a list of people I have marked as “Trusted Friends” - or could I request a list of contacts from Flickr which I have marked as “family”?

If that is/would be the case, I could pass on privacy settings from other plattforms to use them on my own profile page - maybe even in a different way. In the case of Brightkite that would mean, that trusted friends see my detailed location and in the case of Flickr it would mean, that they see more pictures of me.

What will I do?

I think I will start with this whitelist to just have it running as an example how it could feel like and then I hope that the other described scenarios will be implemented by talented developers of maybe the DiSo Project or Noserub

But right now I am in the phase where I need to write down the concept. So first of all let’s think about the ideal solution. Any ideas and feedback maybe?

Above you see an extract of a first draft of a wireframe (see here the full wireframe) I have done the last days, while I work on the relaunch of this website.

The basic idea is, as you might have already noticed, that I create my very own profile page - which will be the new homepage of pixelsebi.com - and to therefore have my very own comprehensive and aggregated online identity - hosted on my own server, under my own domain - everything done based on open standards and Wordpress.

This profile page integrates all the things you wanna have

• a picture of yourself and links to the most important services you use on the web
• a big interactive area to promote yourself, your publications, your projects and so on
• basic contact details and a possbility to connect with you (”friend request”)
• a place to display some RSS Feeds like your recent blogposts, podcasts or event on upcoming org
• an aggregated(!) (will explain that in another post) list of all your contacts
• a livestream of your activities on the web (take a look at the full wireframe)
• and even more areas to integrate content you might publish elsewhere

I always wanted to do that for more than a year now, but never really started to make it happen. But now - due to the increasing adoption of OpenID, Open API’s, Microformats and so on, it makes more sense than ever before - because now it’s realistic to implement all the cool features I have in mind.

I will also take a closer look into Noserub and the DiSo Project again, because what they work on get’s pretty close to what I need in the background.

I have never published a wireframe of mine so far, but thought that in this case it would be a good idea to share my ideas and to get feedback. I will publish more about my ideas within the next weeks and will highlight special features you might already forefeel if you take a closer look at the wireframe

All you need to do right now is to use this URL:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

… as your OpenID. I did the proof of concept and tried it with ma.gnolia and Dopplr. It worked without any problems.

That’s quite great and just shows again, that it is a correct implementation of the specification. Of course it is not Google’s intention that users have to remember this long URL, but the idea right now seems to be, that you will find a special link at OpenID consumer site, which says something likes “Login with your Google Account” and then you will be directed to Google without having this URL in mind.

So here is the proof - I documented my test with Dopplr in six screenshots: (sorry no screencast)

Step1: Adding the URL as OpenID at Dopplr

Step2: Tell Google that Dopplr is allowed to add this OpenID

Step3: Dopplr has now added my Google OpenID to my account

Step4: I logged out everywhere and tried to login with the Google OpenID

Step5: Google wants me to login with my Google Account

Step6: Finished - I am back at Dopplr after I hit “Sign in” before

Das ist vielleicht die Frage, die sich jetzt - auf Grund der vielfältigen News der letzten Tage - einige Webseitenbetreiber in Deutschland (hoffentlich) stellen. (und bezieht sich auf den Consumer und nicht Provider-Part)

Oliver Wagner hat zwar gerade in seinem Blog Post geschrieben, dass auf den Münchener Medientagen kaum jemand was von OpenID jemals gehört zu haben scheint, aber ich hoffe doch, dass sich gerade unseren deutschen Web2.0 Vorzeige-Startups (Qype, Sevenload, Jovoto, Mister Wong, Plazes, Xing, StudiVZ und Co.) jetzt mal ernsthaft mit dem Thema auseinandersetzen.

Im möchte im folgenden kurz Gründe aufzählen die dafür sprechen, aber auch noch die berechtigten Bedenken aufzeigen, die man im Hinterkopf haben muss.

Gründe die dafür sprechen

Prinzipiell ist es natürlich eine schöne Sache, dass es überhaupt eine Single-Sign-On Lösung für das Web gibt, da sie einfach enorm den Komfort für den Nutzer erhöht.

Darüber hinaus bin ich auch nach wie vor davon überzeugt, dass sich mit OpenID die Conversion-Rates beim Login und der Registrierung letzten Endes steigern lassen, da:

• Nutzer weniger mit dem Problem konfrontiert werden ihr Passwort vergessen zu haben. Umständliche Passwort-Recovery Prozesse entfallen damit im Regelfall.
• der Registrierungsprozess vereinfacht werden kann und der Nutzer nicht nochmal alle Daten neu eingeben muss.

Dann sollte man auch wissen, dass mit OpenID weit mehr als nur die Registrierung und der Login abgewickelt werden können, sondern auch weitere an diese Identität gekoppelte Schnittstellen verfügbar gemacht werden. (siehe z.B. Portable Contacts API)

Jeder Webdienst der also z.B. davon lebt, dass seine Anwender ihre Kontakte hinzufügen und ggf. auch Content - wie z.B. Bilder von Flickr - mitbringen, sollte daher ein hohes Interesse daran haben OpenID zu implementieren.

Darüber hinaus wird OpenID auch eine Schlüsselrolle bei den Bestrebungen spielen letzten Endes eine Sync Funktionalität fürs Web zu bekommen, wie das heute bereits auf Geräte Ebene (Sync zwischen Desktop Rechner, Laptop und Telefon) der Fall ist.

Und zu guter Letzt haben wir auch fünf weitere “schwergewichtige” Gründe für OpenID anzuführen:

1. Jeder Google Account Inhaber hat jetzt eine OpenID
2. Jeder Yahoo Nutzer hat jetzt eine OpenID
3. Jeder Microsoft Live Nutzer hat jetzt eine OpenID
4. Jeder MySpace Nutzer wird eine OpenID haben
5. Jeder AOL Nutzer hat jetzt eine OpenID

Damit haben wir jetzt ein sehr hohes theoretischen Potential an Anwendern, die zumindest eine OpenID besitzen.

Als ich noch vor fast zwei Jahren mit einem der oben genannten deutschen Startups über OpenID gesprochen habe, konnte ich sehr gut nachvollziehen, dass man es damals noch nicht wagen wollte OpenID zu implementieren, da sich natürlich die Frage stelle, wieviele Leute denn überhaupt eine OpenID haben.

Allerdings kann man zwei Jahre später nicht mehr wirklich von einem “Henne Ei Problem” sprechen. Aber es gibt durchaus noch Dinge die man bedenken sollte, die ich jetzt selbstverständlich im Folgenden auch anführen möchte.

Was man bedenken muss

Es gibt im Moment vor allem zwei Punkte die man im Kopf haben sollte:

1. Brutto vs. Netto Nutzer

Zwar haben jetzt in der Theorie sehr viele Leute eine OpenID, d.h. aber natürlich nicht, dass diese das auch allesamt wissen, geschweige denn mit dem Begriff OpenID etwas anfangen können. In meinen Augen gibt es da noch viel an Marketing Arbeit zu leisten, um das Potential auch wirklich aktiviert zu bekommen.

Die Anzahl an Netto Nutzer wird allerdings sicherlich von jetzt an stetig steigen. Wie schnell dies geschieht hängt dabei aus meiner Sicht von drei Faktoren ab:

• was investieren die großen Betreiber in die Vermarktung dieses neuen Features von sich aus
• wieviele Webseiten Betreiber werden OpenID als Consumer implementieren und selbst aktiv vermarkten
• wie werden die Bekannten User Experience Probleme angegangen, um OpenID in der Masse benutzbar zu machen

2. User Experience Problem

Im Moment gibt es aus aktuellen Anlass (UX Studie von Yahoo) eine Diskussion darüber, wie man die UX von OpenID verbessern kann. Die Ergebnisse dieser Diskussion - die vermutlich intensiv in zwei Wochen auf dem Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View fortgeführt wird - werden definitiv noch gewisse Auswirkungen darauf haben, wie man idealerweise OpenID als Consumer implementieren wird.

D.h.: wer bereits jetzt (sagen wir im November) OpenID implementiert, wird vermutlich in wenigen Monaten bereits wieder gewisse Änderungen vornehmen müssen. Wie gravierend die sein werden, kann ich aber im Moment schlecht abschätzen.

Dabei spielen insbesondere noch folgende Faktoren eine Rolle:

• wird OpenID wirklich als eigenständiger Brand vermarktet werden?
• werden Email-Adressen als Identifier zugelassen?
• wird es elegantere Implementierungslösungen für die Re-Direkt Problematik geben?

Abschliessende Worte

Ich denke zusammenfassend kann man sagen, dass gerade durch die Unterstützung der oben genannten “Big Five” sich hiermit OpenID definitiv durchgesetzt hat und man nicht mehr die Gefahr eingeht auf das falsche Pferd zu setzen.

Wenn jetzt allerdings Webseiten Betreiber auf Grund der aktuellen Diskussionen um Vermarktung und User-Experience noch Bedenken haben, umgehend auf den fahrenden Wagen aufzuspringen, kann ich das gut nachvollziehen.

Schaden kann es allerdings nicht bereits jetzt einen Developer und durchaus auch eigene User-Experience Leute auf das Thema anzusetzen und in das Thema intensiv einzusteigen - denn kommen wird es mit Sicherheit. 

Nächste Woche, den 6. November findet das erste Open Web Meetup in Berlin statt. Ziel der Veranstaltung ist es in einer lockeren Runde Menschen aus Berlin (oder Leute die zufällig gerade in Berlin sind) zusammenzubringen, die sich für alle Themen rund um das Open Web interessieren.

Wichtiger Hinweis: Nein - es findet NICHT im St. Oberholz statt Infos zur Location und die Anmeldung erfolgt hier!