It’s ironic that it’s Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it’s big news.

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New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”

That means fewer passwords to remember. Just log in with your favorite OpenID supporting account and don’t worry about one just for Facebook. Single sign on is just the simplest benefit though.

Presumably, the friends you bring with you in your OpenID account will be searched for automatically on Facebook. “In tests we’ve run,” the company said today, “we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.”

Contact lists are the second simplest benefit of this kind of data portability, but other payloads are possible and that’s when it gets even more exciting. We’ll see what Facebook does to move the ball even further up the court.

Nothing is live yet and we haven’t been able to test out usability (we just got a press release about the forthcoming announcement at 1:30 PM PST, which is latehere.), but Facebook is very good about things like that and has been working with the OpenID community on usability (its biggest challenge) for months.

Expect MySpace, Digg, Twitter and maybe some Yahoo sites to start accepting OpenID from other companies by the end of this summer at the latest. It’s only a matter of time now that Facebook has.

Note: Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch argues otherwise:

“Facebook has really been a relying party since its inception – there’s never been a “Facebook ID” because you’ve always used your university Email (or more recently, your personal Email) to log in. So the site isn’t really sacrificing anything by enabling OpenID support. The likes of Google and Microsoft have built many services tied to their own proprietary accounts, and they’re going to be far more hesitant to give those up.”

We can see some strong logic here, but we also suspect there will be additional factors that emerge, like an increasing number of websites deciding to become OpenID providers so their user data can be used in Facebook, that will keep the current flowing in this direction.

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Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

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According to the Portable Contacts website:

we’re seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google’s GData Contacts API, Yahoo’s Address Book API, and Microsoft’s Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it’s truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That’s much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that’s good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You’ve heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That’s where we’re headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That’s a pretty big deal and it’s fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we’ll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

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If it did, that could be a real game changer. We’d love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That’s what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it’s the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

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Cliqset isn’t a social network that you’d go and join like you would others, it’s more like the glue that ties together your identities across all supporting social networks. Unlike other similar services, though, this portable system of identity, contacts and activities works two ways. It allows your identity to be changed by what you do around the web, it doesn’t just serve up a centralized identity to dependent lesser networks you log in to. This identity provider could treat supporting sites much more as equals than Facebook does, for example.

Cliqset uses the OAuth data standard to do all this, so it doesn’t even have to ask for your password to the networks you want to connect.

Who’s using Cliqset so far? Unfortunately, the geeks behind Cliqset don’t do a very good job explaining what they do and they don’t have any examples other than their own site today at launch.

That could change soon, though. The company has released a variety of code libraries for developers to drop Cliqset support into their applications. At launch there are Java, iPhone and .net for Windows Mobile libraries. A PHP library is forthcoming. All the libraries will be open sourced and posted to Google Code.

Facebook Connect lets 3rd parties publish updates to a user’s activity stream, but that’s about it. We asked a number of hardcore identity geeks whether they had seen anything quite like Cliqset before and no one had. There are OpenID and related specifications aiming to accomplish just this, but nothing in the wild yet, according to the OpenID Foundation and Six Apart’s David Recordon.

Recordon is a little concerned about seeing another company release an API to accomplish what Cliqset aims to do. “At first glance, it seems like Cliqset is leaning in the correct direction with their support of OAuth for APIs and OpenID for sign in, but are still creating their own APIs – ala Facebook Connect – when dealing with profiles and activities,” he told us. “This is both yet another validation of the work by the wider DiSo community and opportunity to finalize the Portable Contacts and Activity Streams specifications for broad adoption on the social web.”

We asked Cliqset specifically about Facebook Connect, whether it wasn’t in the company’s interest to implement a Read/Write capability in its identity system as well. They said they believed it was but that they expected the giant social network to take much longer to implement this key feature. By offering iPhone and Windows Mobile libraries right out of the gate, we think Cliqset could move quickly in the mobile world as well.

Unfortunately, the company isn’t doing a terribly good job of explaining its fundamental value proposition so far. We’re not the first site to cover Cliqset today (see PC World’s coverage for example) and everyone else is writing up the company as just one more cross-site identity provider. There’s more than that going on here, but we’ll see if this startup with what it calls “the most robust APIs you’ll find anywhere” is able to make the market headway that its innovative vision seems to warrant.

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By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?

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The vision for all these kinds of systems is that allowing readers to authenticate themselves with a trusted 3rd party makes them more likely to post comments, offers exposure to site owners when comments are syndicated into activity streams on bigger sites and should allow site owners to access verified information about their readers’ profiles and interests. That last part is still something we’re waiting for, but that should be part of the value proposition to site owners.

Facebook Connect has been lauded for its usability; so much so that advocates of OpenID felt deeply threatened until Facebook teamed up to work with them on the OpenID user experience. In contrast, the Yahoo/JS-Kit user experience is immediately quite usable and full-featured. The same type of pop-up window asks users to grant permission to JS-Kit (or any other site using Yahoo! Updates) to access their Yahoo! profile information. There are a few extra boxes users have to click in order to grant that permission, but that’s the extent of the complications. You can test the implementation on this page.

We’re quite impressed with the technology and we’re always appreciative of the way that Yahoo! supports open standards. It’s not as if the company is accepting 3rd party OpenID login on Yahoo! sites yet, but all these other little steps are quite significant.

One thing that Yahoo! doesn’t currently offer is syndication of off-site activities into Yahoo! properties. The company says that’s coming soon.

In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors)…Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, etc.

If you thought Facebook represented the mainstream face of newsfeeds, 3rd party identity authentication, etc. just imagine what Yahoo! could do. The only question is whether the giant company will move fast enough – Facebook is very close to having stolen its thunder already. Yahoo! has been talking about “opening up” and integrating social data across its sites for months, Facebook tends to be much, much faster at taking action and innovating.

Facebook Connect is also available on JS-Kit supported pages, so it’s not as if Yahoo! has surpassed Connect. We’ve asked Facebook for a precise number of pages that Connect is available on and are awaiting a reply. We do know that the company says that 6,000 developers have implemented Connect, but for all we know that number includes JS-Kit with its 600,000 sites as just one developer.

What do you think of the new JS-Kit/Yahoo! tie-in? Would you use it on sites where both it and Facebook Connect are an option? You can test Facebook Connect here on our site or both Connect and the new Yahoo! Updates commenting over on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

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Now they’ve joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to “pull a Microsoft” and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. We think this is good news. Here is why.

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Both systems, OpenID and Facebook Connect, claim to offer a number of benefits:

1. Both make it easier to participate in new websites because you don’t need to create a new account.
2. Both carry payloads of user data that can yield immediate personalization for a richer experience.
3. Both offer authentication that you really are who you say you are. That opens up a whole world of possibilities technically and culturally.

That’s what this is all about, here’s why we think tonight’s news is important.

1. ID Systems Should Be Integrated

Users shouldn’t have to choose between logging in someplace with an OpenID log-in or with Facebook Connect. We should be given both options wherever possible, including on Facebook. Facebook could allow users to associate another account with a Facebook account and just log in using that other account. No big deal. As OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina told me in a recent interview, user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors.

We hope that today’s announcement will be a step in that direction.

Image above: JanRain’s RPX product, as seen on over 200 Universal Music artists’ web pages.

2. OpenID’s Momentum is Incredible, Really

A lot of people complain that OpenID is moving too slowly; they see the problems with it and don’t understand why it’s taking the rest of the web to hurry up and solve those problems.

In reality, OpenID has gone from a LiveJournal technical project, to being a mailing list for freaks and dreamers to becoming a global phenomenon that huge companies are contributing their time, money and brand names in order to help develop – all in just 3 years.

Just for context – OpenID is younger than YouTube and Facebook, neither of which have quite figured out how to monetize changing the world yet. So give OpenID a break, it’s doing really well. Getting Facebook on board the OpenID Foundation is a big win and just the latest of many recent victories.

3. The User Experience Help Will Be Invaluable

Everybody knows that the User Experience with OpenID is difficult for people unfamiliar with it, and sometimes for people who are familiar with it. Facebook is often offered as an example of how it can be done, but as a grumpy OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina put it tonight – “Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.”

OpenID is a complicated thing. Who better to help work on the user experience, though, than Facebook? Their designers have done a great job and everyone says that the UX will be priority #1 now that Facebook is on board. Throw enough designers at the problem, from a wide variety of companies, and there should be several good solutions at least.

It’s probably not going to be that hard to fix, either. Check out this proposed solution, for example. That’s getting closer is it not?

4. Compromises Will Be Made, Both Ways

How are standards created? Through compromise, negotiation and collaboration. The legal work is one of the hardest parts and the OpenID Foundation completed most of that a year ago, ensuring that no one is going to sue anyone else over using OpenID on a website. Things might get a little more complicated with Facebook’s entry, but this capable and now larger community should be able to figure it out.

Will the option to log in with Facebook Connect have to be included on other sites that prefer OpenID? Will OpenID have to be an option on Facebook at some level? Neither of those would be the end of the world and the benefits should far outweigh the costs.

5. Facebook is Not Entirely Evil

Readers sympathetic to open standards and critical of proprietary technology may have a picture in their minds eye of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together and cackling about how the famous $1 billion offer he turned down to buy the company was not enough money. In reality, Zuckerberg is a big dork – a brilliant, lucky, too-powerful dork, but he doesn’t seem like that bad a person. There are, we’re sure, power hungry and distasteful people working in the organization – but there are lots and lots of people who are genuinely focused largely on innovation and improving the world. The OpenID Foundation assured us of that in their announcement today and that’s been our experience in dealing with Facebook as press as well. (Trust me, this author in particular generally doesn’t like almost anyone in an executive position at these huge internet companies.)

Especially among the Facebook engineers there is hope. Just like we’re very skeptical of Google’s frightening power over the world we live in but really like a lot of individual Google engineers, so too with Facebook come a lot of people who will be great to have working along side the existing OpenID community.

So, cynics, that’s why we think tonight’s announcement is good news.

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So far it’s just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

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“Distributed Social Networking” (DiSO) is what a growing number of people are calling the move to aggregate and integrate our activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and our personal blogs. (See also the DiSO Project.) Much of the conversation concerns technical standards to make it possible, but once it’s technically doable – how should it look for users? Canter offers the following proposal and we think it’s a good one.

Marc Canter believes that the “dashboard” is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter’s proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it’s the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that’s really the meat of his proposal. He says he’s working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends’ new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media – this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you’ve posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists – you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what’s public, what’s private, what’s viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your “social graph” aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren’t figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

Discuss

MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.

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Technology combined with Hype Machine’s own aggregation and parsing includes:

• Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.
• Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we’ve see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.
• Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable “shows” about all the music, including interviews with the artists.
• Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.

The end result is an awesome site that we’ll be visiting all week and beyond. When it comes to data driven media mashups, we can’t sing Hype Machine’s praises loud enough. With this new site they’ve really outdone themselves.

Check it out at hypem.com/zeitgeist.

As part of this year’s Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out – we love them, we hate them, we wouldn’t want to work without them.

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This is the fourth in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

About the Selections

These aren’t all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don’t feel that it’s made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press’s AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator – it’s a great way to learn about what’s happening all over the continent and it’s a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

Formerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we’ve seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don’t follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social “life streaming” service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends’ friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

If RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It’s one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you’d like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we’ve posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There’s nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.

Snackr

Snackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its frenetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It’s where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn’t been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader’s incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

One of the simplest little changes we’ve made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page’s RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it’s a great little indication of a site’s popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named “uncv” and we’d like to thank them. We love what they’ve done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It’s already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction – a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we’re always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

Unfortunately, some sites don’t like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we’d be drawn back to a site, so it’s their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

Love it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It’s the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google’s RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can’t be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That’s compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there’s not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don’t know what we’d do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds – from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I’ve got 68 different feeds in my account and I’ll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn’t innovated substantially in the last year – but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there’s much more you can do with it as well. It’s great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We’ve used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don’t have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.

Those Were Our Favorites This Year – How About You?

Did we miss anyone you think should have been on this list? We hope you’ll share your favorites in comments below. What RSS and syndication products impacted you the most in 2008?

Discuss

Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn’t just about desktop software anymore – now it’s about our identities and social connections, all around the web. We’ve published a mind map below displaying our understanding of the contrasts between these two identity systems. If you’d like to add our thoughts to that map, you can.

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This battle isn’t about “single sign-on” – it’s about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more), it’s about the developer communities, usability and ownership. It’s very important to the future of our user experience online and it’s a fascinating study in contrasts.

The mind map above illustrates our understanding of the relative merits of these two leading identity solutions. We thought it was an effective way of discussing a complex situation succinctly. We created it collaboratively using MindMeister. (disclosure: Mindmeister is a recent RWW sponsor)

We haven’t drawn a conclusion yet about who we think will win. We like Facebook Connect, but we like OpenID better. We’re cheering for both, but louder for the open source, open standard solution. We think Facebook’s odds are better, but perhaps the OpenID community will rise to the challenge now that it has such a formidable competitor.

Do you think we’ve missed anything really important? If so, feel free to edit the mind map on this page: Identity: FB Connect vs. OpenID (You’ll need a MindMeister account to do so.) Below you can see a click and drag embedded display of the latest state of this map that our readers have updated with their thoughts. You can see it full screen here. Update: A big thank you to the several of you who have gone in and made changes! That’s awesome!

Facebook Connect vs. OpenID is going to be a big decision that every website owner should consider. What do you think the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems are?

Thanks to the Vidoop crew for the conversation this morning that inspired this post.

See also: What if Amazon and iTunes Implemented Facebook Connect?

Discuss

Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.

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To be honest, I don’t personally care for Evernote’s core product, I’ve found its Optical Character Recognition to be weak. The company has told me that I should put data in, use it as a blunt instrument for remembering things and someday their continually improving algorithm will be able to read text in notes and images better than it can now. I don’t really buy that. That said, thousands of other people are absolutely gaga over the service and no one can deny that their announcements today are very cool.

Evernote already works on the desktop, on the iPhone and on the web. Now we’ll see all kinds of other applications support Evernote as well. The company points to a Salesforce integration in the works and jokes that even a Rock Band tie-in could happen. The API uses standards based authentication protocol OAuth, which is fabulous. That means that if you as a developer want to tie in to Evernote, or today’s newly launched Netflix API or any of the Google Data APIs, then you’ve got one standard form of API to plug in to. That’s a big time saver.

Even more exciting is full XML data export. Nervous about dedicating a whole lot of time to import business cards, notes and other information into Evernote? Now you don’t have to be, because the company allows easy export of all that data in a standard format you can take elsewhere. This kind of data portability allows users to feel comfortable investing time and data in a service. It’s something that too many other similar services don’t allow.

For coverage of the Evernote news by someone who likes Evernote far more, check out Rafe Needleman’s post at Webware. If the entire service can perform as well as the company has in making the moves it announced today, then Evernote should be well worth your time.

Discuss