RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful – so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.

Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.

How it Works

The most important part of Swurl is the timeline view, where all the messages, bookmarks, album covers and photos you’ve saved in various services are organized in a calendar view. It’s a great way to look back at days gone by – we’ve found already that it can’t help but put your experiences into a different perspective.

In addition to the timeline view, Swurl also publishes your activities in a blog-type format. Each person’s blog is highly customizable. If you’ve hesitated to send the URL to your crazy-chaotic FriendFeed page to your grandma, maybe you should send her to a Swurl page instead.

Inside of each item you’ll find all kinds of visual treats, like a nice slideshow viewer, song lyrics displayed below the Flash audio player for each song in your time line and elegant captions on your photos. There are lots of nice little touches here and we hope it will only continue to improve.

One of the areas the app could really use improvement is in viewing your friends’ activities. You probably don’t want to use it for that, unless it’s very casual. Swurl discovers your friends on various services but displays their activities in a boring list that’s spotty and hours behind.

The big picture here for us is that RSS feeds and lifestream data in particular can really look great when displayed nicely and mashedup with various sources of data. By grouping your activities into a calendar view, Swurl really facilitates a change in perspective. We think you’ll enjoy this app and we are excited to see where it goes in the future.

Open standard based user authentication protocol oAuth has now been implemented across all Google Data APIs, quickly offering this young standard for easy mashups more market validation than it’s ever had before.

Eight months ago we wrote about the launch of oAuth 1.0, asking if the standard would lead to a flood of mashups across the web.

A standard method of authenticating users across different services means that mashup builders need only write one authentication process, then apply it to all data sources that support the standard. That’s hot, and it’s now spreading faster around the web than we thought. We discuss what this means for users below.

Google’s Support

Last night the Google Data API blog announced that oAuth is now available for all Google Data APIs, everything from Gmail contacts to Google Calendar to Docs to YouTube. This means that 3rd party app developers now have one easy, standardized and secure way to authenticate that their users really own the Google accounts they say they do – without the apps asking users for their Google passwords. That data from Google can then be mashed up with any other application interested in leveraging it.

Google had included oAuth into the OpenSocial framework, but there was little indication that app developers were making use of it. Google’s recently launched FriendConnect offered website developers disappointingly little access to their users’ data – partitioning the Google functionality into an iframe inside participating pages.

Other Support

We’ve wondered recently whether oAuth was just a good idea that wasn’t really gaining any traction. The list of sites with live oAuth support has been much smaller than we hoped. Now that’s changing fast. PhotoBucket offers oAuth support and today SmugMug announced it as well.

We expect to see oAuth authenticating and relying parties spring up all around the web now that coveted Google user data is available through oAuth.

What This Means for Users

There is now no good reason for new applications to ask you for your Gmail username and password in order to access your list of contacts. Don’t give it to them – there’s a standard, approved way for them to access that data now that doesn’t require giving them unlimited access to your entire account.

Apps that don’t use the approved Google user authentication method in short order will be acting like a mail carrier who says they have to have a key to the inside of your house to pick up your mail because they aren’t familiar with the mailbox on the front porch.

Furthermore, we as users can now expect a thrilling new wave of mashup options that can take secure advantage of our Google data. Google’s adoption of oAuth is one of the most significant, tangible moves in support of authentic data portability that we’ve seen in a long time. App developers should be tripping over each other to make use of this data so that our use of their apps can be made richer, more powerfully useful and engaging. While they are developing to take advantage of Google’s oAuth APIs, why not offer some oAuth back out to the world as well? Google’s validation of the standard should start a snowball of standards enabled mashups.

We’re very excited that Google has taken this step to un-silo our data and support the mutually beneficial ecosystem of mashup developers and users. We’re very happy too for the community of oAuth supporters, who have done a great job building and spreading something so needed around the web. Today is a good day for the future of the web.

Social news site Digg announced today that it has added semantic markup to fields throughout its site as well as adding support for a handful of key microformats. By adding RDFa and DublinCore markup to news item pages, Digg will now make its content far more searchable by semantically aware search engines.

Combined with microformats that will structure signification of identity and social connections, the new structure of the site could enable any number of interesting mashup possibilities.

Just this week we were criticizing Digg for lagging behind competitor Mixx in the sophistication of its API! Though the announcement is encouraging, it still falls short of the hopes we’ve had.

The New Look, Under the Covers

XFN and hCard have been added to Digg to communicate names, nicknames, identities in photos and friends lists. You can see what this looks like by going to any Digg item page, viewing the source code and searching for the word “property.” Speaking of property, you’ll notice that attribution for each page is now also marked up formally: content submitted to Digg is attributed to the public domain by “Digg users.”

All of this might seem mundane but thinking just a few steps ahead lets us imagine any number of possibilities. My favorite? Friends network (XFN) plus Attention Profiles (Digging histories via the already supported APML) combined to offer high quality recommendations on any site that wants to pull in the data and process it. Remember, though – if you want to use your Digg history for anything elsewhere then you’ve got to turn on your APML profiling via that obscure little green button next to the “most dugg in last 30 days” section on your profile.

Hold on a Second, What About…

As much fun as that all sounds, and as much as we like Digg – there’s a couple of issues here. APML is a big part of the juice behind the social graph that’s being exposed but Digg isn’t doing a very good job with that format. Users have to turn it on and it hardly exposes anything (here’s mine for download, for example.) Here’s me, here’s my friends and here’s what we all like: why offer a half-hearted description of the last part, what we all like?

Second, has Digg just given up on OpenID? The company made a high profile announcement more than a year ago saying that they would support it. Then everyone waited until OpenID 2.0 came out. It’s been out now, and now OpenID support.

Finally, what about Mixx’s read/write API that lets users read, submit and comment from 3rd party sites? What about Sk*rt’s bookmarklet to let users post things from offsite? Is Digg putting some slivers of standards-based markup on their site and expecting everyone to be thankful for it? I know I’d like to see more.

Digg’s a great site and it’s terrific that they are publicly announcing their move to include semantic markup for search engines and microformats for mashup developers. The depth of the data portability moves just seem disproportionate with the size of the community, the roll the company has played in the web 2.0 economy and the potential for really extensive innovation.

OpenID, a technology that allows users to sign in to new supporting websites through a single trusted ID provider of their choice, is notoriously hard for non-developers to implement and in many cases use. One of the biggest challenges may have been eliminated, however, by the recent release of a new service called MyOpenID for Domains.

The service makes it remarkably easy for anyone to create OpenID accounts through their own domain, using the MyOpenID authentication service.

For example, my new OpenID is http://openid.marshallk.com/marshallk, based on my personal site marshallk.com. It was really easy to set up and now I can offer other users of my site their own marshallk.com OpenID as well. (Hi Mom!)

How It’s Done

MyOpenID for Domains lets you set up OpenIDs in one of two formats: Wildcard subdomains like member.yourdomain.com or as a single subdomain + path like openid.yourdomain.com/member.

I chose the single subdomain plus member path because I want to be able to use other subdomains for other purposes.

It’s really easy to set up either path. For my Wordpress blog I just filled out the form below, then I had to call my webhost (Bluehost – great customer service, terrible uptime) and ask them to make a small edit to my DNS record. I gave them this information:

Name: openid.marshallk.com
Type: CNAME
Value: www.myopenid.com

They made the change needed, basically setting up a redirect, in less than 5 minutes. Other hosts will let you edit your own DNS info. I then posted a page on my blog with a particular URL and a short code for MyOpenID to detect. That’s it – I was done. Now I can use my own domain name as an OpenID. The next step was to make sure that my user identity page was looking spiffy.

If MyOpenID ever closes its doors, it will be easy for me to edit my DNS record back and keep my OpenID URL from becoming a 404 out of my control. I’ll also now be able to verify that I am in fact the owner of marshallk.com.

Limitations of the Service

This is the easiest way I’ve found to use my own domain name as an OpenID. There are other ways to do it but they’ve always given me far more trouble than they should. This service from MyOpenID is also an easy way to offer and administer OpenID accounts to other users of a particular website.

MyOpenID is a good OpenID provider. MyOpenID for Domains does require that you use their service in particular, however. There are many different OpenID providers offering many different advanced features. Check out SpreadOpenID.org for a comparison of many different providers.

As you can see below, my MyOpenID profile is now tied to my domain. All I need now is the ability to put HTML links in my summary info, display recent items in an RSS feed of my choice on this page and some other customization options. Then I’ll be doing great.

Watch this space for more forthcoming news on big increases in OpenID usability.

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who’s subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired.

I was feeling frustrated yesterday when switching from one feed reader to another on a new computer. Then I remembered how wonderful RSS really is – and I decided to write this post. I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful.

Seven tips for making the most of your RSS reader, from simple to more complex.

1. Oversubscribe

I’m a big believer in subscribing to anything that looks of interest. Read what you can and don’t worry about the rest. The chances that you’ll see something worthwhile in a feed are far, far higher if you’ve subscribed to it than they would have been if you hadn’t.

The world of the web is a raging river; any fear you have of sticking your toe in a big, fast current is no reason to spend all your time in a tiny stream instead, in hopes perhaps that you can drink all the water.

I don’t know why people feel obligated to read every item in every feed they’ve subscribed to. Get over that and you’ll already be a far happier person. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read “watchlists” – searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy.

2. Try a River of News View

Some feed readers require that you click through all of one feed’s items at a time. Others allow you to see whatever individual items are most recent, regardless of what source feed they came from. This is the prefered method of most news bloggers – but it could serve you well too.

There’s no way to read every item in every feed you’ve subscribed to, so after reading what’s most important – try switching to what’s most recent!

Try reading those items in order of appearance, until you don’t want to read them any more. Then stop. Maybe mark all as ready, maybe don’t worry about it. Life’s too short to worry about it, aren’t you glad you read what you were able to find the time to read?

3. Use Multiple Services

Some feeds are really important and are best read outside of the bulky environment of a feed reader. Try starting a Netvibes, Pageflakes or iGoogle page for the feeds you want to be able to quickly check out throughout the day. Drag the link from your address bar to your browser’s toolbar and shapow – you’ve got a one-click way to check a handful of your most important feeds for updates.

If you haven’t used one of these services before, here’s a link to try out a Netvibes page I created to display some top sources in the Open Data movement.

4. Try Out a Desktop Reader

By most indications, Google Reader is the most popular RSS reader on the market and Bloglines is a close second. There are many reasons to try out a desktop reader like NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or Vienna. The picture below is of the desktop reader I’ve been using lately, Attensa for Mac. It’s not as functional as NetNewsWire, and it’s not as pretty as NewsFire, but it’s quite stable. There are many, many different feed readers that do many different things. BlogBridge, for example, just released a feature that lets you filter between “positive” and “negative” articles by sentiment!

• Desktop readers are faster and more responsive. Almost everything you need is stored locally on your hard drive so it’s faster than AJAX. Google Reader is nice and smooth but tends to time-out and freeze if you’re subscribed to more than 1k feeds.
• Local storage of the articles in your feeds means you can access posts that are no longer online, you can see the difference between originally published and current versions and you can read your feeds if you’re offline.

5. Tag Items to Share

Sharing items helps make your feed reading more meaningful and thus easier to do. If you know that people have subscribed to your shared items feed, then it makes even more sense to open up that feed reader and continue supplying the fruits of your good taste.

Google Reader has a popular shared-items feed, but it’s not easy to control and if you stop using Google Reader then you lose your items and social connections. If instead you offer people a FeedBurner feed of shared items, you can plug any RSS feed in as the source for that feed. Bookmark items “toshare” in Del.icio.us and grab the RSS that tag in your account produces – publish that through Feedburner and you can know how many people have subscribed. Then, if you stop using del.icio.us and switch to Ma.gnolia – you can just change your source feed of shared items without changing the ultimate Feedburner feed and losing your subscribers.



Above is a shot of my blog and shared items feed, spliced together using a third party service called FeedDigest. Knowing that people want to read what I bookmark motivates me to read feeds and to open my bookmarking service.

6. Learn about OPML

OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is a really simple file format that’s the standard way to move bundles of RSS feeds around. If you use an RSS reader, you’ve already got an OPML file! Using OPML you can:

• Export your subscriptions from one feed reader in OPML format and import them into a different service in order to try out something new. Different feed readers are worth trying out as they can do different things. Some are good for a quick glance, others allow you to subscribe to password protected feeds (Google Reader does not!) and some you can use offline on a plane.
• You can swap full or partial reading lists with friends. (”I’ll trade you my favorite sources on supply chain management for your favorite sources on CRM!” Oh yeah, fun times.)
• You can try to get an invite to the OPML sharing service Toluu (our coverage) or you can spend a day in Google Reader – both are great ways to use automatic recommendations to discover top new sources.
• You can send co-workers a collection of feeds for easy bulk import. I do this everywhere I work.
• If you work in PR, for example, you could send us (at tips@readwriteweb.com) the OPML file of all your clients’ company RSS feeds. Would you please? (Don’t know how? See this post with instructions.) A dirty little secret – at least some of us here read company blogs much more closely than we read press releases.

Want to try out an OPML file? Here’s one: the RWW Best Feeds on Data Visualization, from our Toolkit for Key Issues of 2008. You can download the file and try importing it into your feed reader, or preview it live below using Grazr

Here’s what the import/export screen looks like for Google Reader, it’s under the settings tab.

7. Try Out Additional Services

The second best thing about RSS, after convenience, is its flexibility. There are so many different ways you can use RSS feeds. Here are a few of my favorites, try experimenting and you’ll get more out of the medium.

• AideRSS is my favorite RSS tool right now, it filters any feed to determine what the most popular items in the feed are. You can then subscribe to just the 20% of posts in a feed with the most comments, inbound links, etc. I do this for feeds on many topics when I’m not invested enough to read every item – I just read what a blogger’s readers thinks is most interesting.
• Social bookmarking tool Ma.gnolia makes it really easy to make friends with interests similar to your own, then to subscribe to a feed of all the things your friends bookmark. That’s a high-quality feed to read.
• Email to RSS lets you keep track of certain types of emails in a different application. I know I get enough email that I need a reminder about some of it. I created a filter in GMail, where each filter/label has its own RSS feed. Just subscribe to this URL in your feed reader https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/label/ but replace the word label with the name of the label you want to subscribe to. If you’ve got a feed reader that supports authenticated, or password protected, feeds – then you can login once and it will display that email feed as RSS every time you load your reader. Google Reader doesn’t support authenticated feeds, but Netvibes and the Newsgator readers do. In theory, our workplaces will someday publish loads of password protected feeds and this is how we’ll read them. For now, there are some things it’s nice to read in RSS instead of getting lost in the email inbox.
• We also like RSS tools like Dapper.net, Feed43, FeedRinse and Yahoo! Pipes around here – but there are so many more RSS tools available! Check out the most popular items tagged RSS in Del.icio.us – and consider subscribing to the feed from that page!

Conclusion

It’s easy to get discouraged with RSS. Trying out new things will help you discover new, magical experiences, though. Letting go of the stress caused by any obligation to read everything will go a long way.

Have a good time with this exciting medium and let us know in comments what your favorite methods for making the most of RSS are.

Little guy reading feeds icon at the top of this post from FastIcon

The timing couldn’t be better for the release of Semantify, a new service from Israel/San Francisco’s Dapper.net. One week after Yahoo! announced that it will begin indexing the semantic markup and meaning of content on the web, Semantify offers a remarkably simple way to get your website marked up semantically. Automatically, forever.

Once you learn how to use Dapper’s basic interface, it can take less than five minutes to set up the Semantify service. Hello SEO, 3.0.

Just a Few Steps

Here’s what it takes:

1. Identify your website and show Dapper a few different pages on it.

2. Point and click to identify particular fields on your pages, like the titles, dates and authors of articles. Sometimes this requires a few extra clicks to exclude false positives in the previewed results.

3. Name those fields according to any number of Semantic Web naming protocols. In my test of Semantify, for my personal site marshallk.com, I used the Dublin Core namespaces “title,” “date,” description” and “creator” to name my fields in Dapper. I could have designated fields as the names of my friends or as particular locations. There are simple descriptions of other namespace conventions linked to from the Semantify page and this part is pretty intuitive.

4. Once you’ve gotten this far, in the standard method of using Dapper you’d grab an RSS feed that would deliver changes that get made to the fields you’re monitoring. With Semantify, though, you get a few lines of PHP code to paste into the header of your website. See the screenshot at the bottom of this post.

And then you’re done.

Dapper GUI + Semantic Web vocab list + PHP embed code = automated Semantic Web markup for your site. It’s like a point and click sitemap creator on the element-by-element level. It’s a perpetual standards-based SEO machine. That’s the incentive for publishers. For the rest of us, once the meaning of content is machine readable – there’s a world of sophisticated information processing we’ll be able to automate and leverage.

It’s The Early Days

It’s as simple as that, or at least it will be once all the little kinks are worked out. At launch the embed code is only available in PHP but the company says more options are right around the corner. The company rushed to get this service out the door and that’s a little obvious right now. It’s also clear that the problems are small ones that they’ll be able to solve quickly. There’s more sophisticated options coming (more granular control over namespaces, for example) and the user interface could always be improved over there. None the less, this service could end up being very, very big.

You can go through those steps above today, I have, and whenever the Yahoo! spider hits your webpage, it will be shown a semantically marked up version of whatever content is live on your pages at the time. It will come from your domain and everyone will be happy. Wash, rinse and repeat for all your domains. Then, thank Dapper for making it so damn easy.

Historical Context

Many people have questioned the viability of the Semantic Web vision, asking who will do the markup. Yahoo! has stepped in and provided the incentive for every publisher to do so, now Dapper’s Semantify is hoping to provide the service that will make it easy, too.

Once it’s just a matter of course for publishers to publish semantic markup with their content, look out world. My favorite example, from our coverage of the Yahoo! announcement, is this: show me all the movie reviews written by a user’s friends who live in Europe. Today, that would be hard to do. Once semantic markup is widely published and indexed – then such queries will be trivial and the only question will be what we want to do with that information.

The Semantic Web could change the world. The only things missing are incentive like Yahoo! now provides and ease-of-use, as Semantify began offering today.

Ten years ago today Jason Kottke launched his influential blog Kottke.org. The site is a fascinating collection of…whatever Kottke cares to post there.

So prescient was his vision of the future of publishing though that today he’s married to the co-founder of Blogger.com and can be counted among the earliest pioneers in the present era of online bricolage – the art of assembling diverse found objects.

Bricolage has become one of the most dominant themes of the new online world. The word may be French and unfamiliar, but you see the concept in action every time you read BoingBoing, for example. There are few blogs more widely read than BoingBoing – but it’s in tribute to Kottke’s 10 year anniversary that we offer the following collection of some our favorite places to discover marvelous things online. All are curated by the careful eyes and hands of one or a few editors, making these sites a different experience than places like Digg, Del.icio.us Popular, PopURLs or elsewhere.

Not only are these types of sites widely read, they are also inspiring a cultural renaissance of bricolage on sites like Tumblr and FFFFound.

Great Sites to Find Fantastic Things

Note: If you are reading this story by RSS, you may not be able to see the dynamic list of recent popular stories from each source. You can click through to the live site to see them. Speaking of RSS, reader Víctor Hernández created a spliced feed of all the blogs below into one at this URL.

BoingBoing

BoingBoing is the biggest mover and shaker here. It’s a group blog with an art and politics slant. It’s a great place to discover “wonderful things” in large quantities. You probably already knew that, though, because you probably already read BoingBoing.

Waxy Links

Waxy Links is the link blog that rides beside Upcoming.org co-founder Andy Baio’s blog Waxy.org. Baio has taken to doing investigative blogging on various topics on his main site, but his link blog is a widely loved river of weird. When your link blog is hot enough to have an ad from the uber-boutique ad network The Deck on it, then you know you’re a monster.

Neatorama

Neatorama is a lot like BoingBoing, but a lot less high-brow and a little more fun. Regular games of “What Is It?” challenge readers to identify photographs of old and unusual objects. The whole site is almost a clearinghouse of weird and it’s a much quicker read than BoingBoing. The long list of authors is lead by Biochemist Alex Santoso, who started the blog as a hobby in 2005.

Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is a great place to find cool art, projects and photography from San Francisco and elsewhere. It’s the work of web-hosting company owner and aficionado of cool Scott Beale.

Beale’s posts regularly hit the front page of Digg and his excellent photos are regularly ripped off without attribution by mainstream media outlets.

JoshSpear.com

JoshSpear.com is run by “one of the youngest brand strategists in the world,” Josh Spear, and has a long list of regular contributors. Spear and crew regularly find some of the coolest art, music, craft, design and marketing projects on the web. In addition to speaking and writing around the world, Spear runs SpearCollective, an artist management collective.

Fresh Creation

FreshCreation is run by Dutch creative Martijn van Osch. The site collects oddly creative works from around the world and almost always includes a video for every post. FreshCreation was the inspiration for our recent post here on the future of interface design.

PicoCool

PicoCool says it “is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people.” Lots of great finds from Etsy and other beautiful, small things. The site is run by web designer Emily Chang, whose company did the new design for RWW.

Swiss Miss

SwissMiss is a widely read design blog written by Swiss transplant to NY Tina Roth Eisenberg. Lots of physical objects here but not exclusively. Eisenberg’s discoveries are regularly reblogged by other cool-hunting blogs.

NotCot

NotCot is a beautiful site that collects image-based links to projects around the web. The site was founded by UX designer Jean Aw and Web 2.0 loving Cognitive Scientist Danial Frysinger. The site’s organization is remarkable as well. Entries are navigable by time, popularity or by random selection.

We Make Money Not Art

we make money not art is a phenomenon that simply must be seen to be believed. Run by an international trio of curators, the site’s aesthetic is oddly fascinating. When the word “bricolage” comes up, we make money not art is the first blog that many people think of.

Those are some of our favorites. What are yours?

We’d love to know.

An open source identity platform called the Higgins Project launched the 1.0 version of their service this week and it’s a nice look into what could be the future of user-centric identity online. Higgins offers a variety of features and services, but the basic premise is that it serves as a portable container you can use to carry multiple identities with you around the web.

Why would users want that? Because you don’t want to sign in to a social network with the same identity card you use to sign in to financial websites. Higgins aims to replace the assorted user names and passwords we all use today with a set of simple, standards-based identifiers that you can take from site to site.

Think of it like a wallet with different credit cards and forms of ID inside. Unfortunately, that’s only a metaphor and there’s nothing about Higgins that’s so easy to do today. Additionally, without a meaningful selection of sites that support the various protocols Higgins lets users leverage – then it’s pretty much a nonstarter. Let’s assume though that identity landscape is going to open up and that OpenID isn’t the only way it will do so. In that case, Higgins is a great idea and interested developers will likely find the project worth a look.

In addition to a browser plug-in for users, there’s libraries that site developers can make use of and an API that will let developers make use of the Higgins Global Graph (HGG) and a quite a few other things with even less hospitable acronyms. OpenID is at least intelligible and end users will not run away when they hear it said out loud.

RSS has changed the world because it is simple. OPML is fun to take to parties because anyone can learn the rules in minutes. I understand that security is by necessity more complex, but any party where as many acronyms show up as is the case with Identity (see below, for example) is not a party I look forward to attending.

The Real Value of Identity Diversification

That said, there is some comprehensible stuff here that’s clearly worth checking out. You may have stopped by someplace like SpreadOpenID.org and noticed that many OpenID vendors let users expose any of multiple “personas” when logging into a new site. Is that sufficient for security, though? Now that I see the Higgins vision explained, I do think that using one service for everything and trusting that single service to keep personas separated from each other is more trust than I care to put in anyone. To some degree, Higgins is asking you to put your trust in them instead, but the assertion is that you the user are in the driver’s seat.

I’m cheering for a clear, simple interface. Hopefully it will arrive sooner than it took the OpenID community to start to move in that direction. That said, I think there’s a lot of potential here in addition to the straightforward and compelling value proposition.

Below: The Higgins Interoperability Framework – don’t be scared, it’s ok.

MySpace is launching its developer platform tomorrow and is going great lengths to highlight the ways it’s different from the Facebook Platform. That’s ironic given that the dominant reaction to the Facebook Platform, from users at least if not the press, is that it’s made the site too much like MySpace.

None the less, there are some very interesting details available about the MySpace Platform. After all, that is where the action is – there’s far more traffic to MySpace than Facebook.

A few highlights concerning the announcement include:

• The best part of the announcement, as far as I’m concerned, is that MySpace apps will be allowed to include user admin/home page interfaces in addition to the part of the app that displays on the public facing profile your friends see. It will be drag and drop, making your admin page a lot like an AJAX start page. This is a big differentiator with Facebook so far.
• Developers will have one month to work on apps for the platform before users come in. It’s open to all, something MySpace says will “democratize” the process and prevent any early-access favoratism given to a handful of select companies on the Facebook Platform.
• User security is high priority and apps will be limited in their ability to access information. Some critics allege that this is not the case at all over on Facebook, saying the Platform there gives total access to any app allowed to enter your profile. That said, see our earlier post today on MySpace and Google.
• There are three APIs, the Google-lead OpenSocial being the primary one, some MySpace extensions for fields like favorite movies is another. Though we’ve said that OpenSocial would be better described as OpenWidget, this instance at least will support social graph portability. Notable. Note also though that this is one more platform deploying “OpenSocial – Plus.” Get enough Plusses in a room together and you have to wonder how much anyone is communicating with anyone else.
• MySpace’s oAuth support, via OpenSocial, will – I believe – make MySpace by far the biggest user of oAuth on the web. That’s great news for this open standards based authentication protocol. More oAuth = more and safter mashups all around the web.

The least convincing reply to my questions came when I asked MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb what would keep MySpace apps from being as annoying as the ones that have lead Facebook users to complain that Facebook is now too much like MySpace. Whitcomb said that MySpace apps would be less annoying because developers would have more and equal time to develop them, this next month before users let in, and so there would be fewer trivial and poorly made apps.

Finally, I’d just like to add to this discussion that MySpace has solved the spam issue better than almost anyone else on the web. Have you noticed? At the end of September MySpace installed a Captcha requirement before a friend request could be sent and I feel like I haven’t gotten a single spam request since then. That’s great!

You can be snobby about your friends’ noisy MySpace pages and the “classier” Facebook experience if you want, but many people are getting tired of the Facebook Platform already and it will be interesting to see what the leading social network online can do now.

Yahoo! announced this morning that the company will authenticate the identities of its 248 million users if they chose to login to OpenID supporting sites with their Yahoo! ID.

Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL’s support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.

Though there’s every reason to hope that today’s Yahoo! announcement will lead to ongoing, meaningful advocacy of OpenID by the company and then a future wherein Yahoo! sites accept OpenID from other providers – there’s also plenty of reason to be concerned that neither will occur and that Yahoo! interests are really only served by spreading the use of Yahoo! ID further around the web.

Nothing but a few information pages are live at Yahoo! yet, though the announcement went out a few hours ago. Those pages say that users will need to enable OpenID for their Yahoo! accounts; there’s no info I can find on how to do that and other sites say they can’t find an OpenID server when I try to use my Yahoo! ID that way. Silly me, nothing will be live until the last day of January it turns out.

Far more is possible

There’s no information about what a Yahoo! OpenID will look like, either. Will it just be a dumb login or will the company offer important functionality like multiple personas (for privacy and user control), search friendly microformats and anti-phishing technology? There’s a wide variety of ways to implement OpenID. I’d recommend you check out the site SpreadOpenID for a feature comparison of a large number of OpenID providers. Just authenticating OpenID is only the beginning, there’s a wide range of features offered by various vendors too.

Public legitimacy and user numbers are great for the OpenID movement to receive from Yahoo! but I hope they will also contribute a significant amount of money. It sure seems to me that the whole thing could use some dedicated staff in order to put some meat on the bones.

What are Yahoo’s interests?

One way to look at today’s announcement is that Yahoo! will now know what other services its users use around the web and big yellow and purple buttons will be spread hither and yon. Sounds great for Yahoo! but if you’ve chosen another OpenID provider who better satisfies your needs – that doesn’t mean much to Yahoo! right now.

What incentive does Yahoo! have to take the next step and offer full support to OpenID in general? Not much right now. In theory that could lead to access to user information from a wider number of users from other communities but when you’re at the top of the hill with 248 million users that might not seem so important.

In theory if Google were to start accepting OpenID logins from Yahoo! users then the floodgates would open and Yahoo! would have to return the favor – but I don’t know if we should hold our breath. Google has opened up to any OpenID login on commenting for Blogger but we’ll see how much further that goes.

What’s needed next

As a peripheral observer of the OpenID movement I probably ought not be so bold as to offer my suggestions for what steps should be taken next – today’s announcement really is a big win for the OpenID community – but I’m an impatient blogger so I am going to do just that.

There needs to be a comprehensive campaign of public education about the value of OpenID in general. If Yahoo! would communicate with its users about these matters in a high-profile way that would be great. How many AOL users know they have an OpenID? Not very many.

Yahoo! should accept inbound OpenID from other providers. Have you seen the way that Basecamp and Ma.gnolia allow users to associate an OpenID with their in-house accounts? That could be a good model for Yahoo! to follow. If OpenID is about openness and not just about extending your own brand elsewhere, something like that has to happen.

Some of these major vendors need to put some money on the table. Presumably there are Yahoo! staff focused on OpenID and related matters, but neutral third parties need to be funded to move the entire agenda forward. I’m sure this is in the works but it’s very important.

The pace of OpenID’s advance is encouraging by some standards – 3 years ago effectively no one had heard of it, two years ago it was a pipe dream and one year ago the ball started rolling. This is the internet, though, and three years ago YouTube didn’t exist. No one would cheer for the progress of online video today if it were crawling forward the way OpenID has. The benefits of online video are clearly communicated and there is money on the table, though.

OpenID is a matter of usability, data portability, user rights and will someday be a competitive necessity for vendors if implemented right. Today’s announcement is good news, but let’s not throw too big a party yet.