The Yahoo! OpenID (beta) which was announced earlier this month has just been launched. You can try it out right away. This is expected to move the OpenID movement ahead considerably. All 250 million members of Yahoo are now able to log in to any website, not just Yahoo, that supports OpenID 2.0.

At this moment you can find very limited list at Yahoo which I hope will be expanded soon.

I have been testing OpenID login with Wordpress.com who also offers OpenID. Right now it seems Wordpress has a more attractive offer than Yahoo. At Yahoo my OpenID URL is:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/rEOH03k2oZKSWDlu_x22Z12oud0-

While at Wordpress.com it is:

http://bomega.wordpress.com

I think I prefer the Wordpress version…

UPDATE: It is possible to change your Yahoo identifier URL into something more easy to remember. I overlooked this possibility when I checked the service yesterday. This means that my Yahoo identifier is now https://me.yahoo.com/openidboris. I still think http://bomega.wordpress.com is easier to remember. Thank you Adam for pointing this out to me.

Eric Abouaf has released WireIt, a library that answers the though: “wow, I wish there was an API that did the UI bits that Yahoo! Pipes does.”

WireIt uses canvas, excanvas for IE, and YUI to get the job done. Take a look at the docs to see how it works.

Here is the code for simple terminals:

And there is even a fun game to check out:

Steve Souders and Stoyan Stefanov have released YSlow 0.9:

There are two big features in this release. By integrating more tightly with Firebug’s Net Panel, YSlow now finds non-DOM components such as Ajax requests and image beacons. And YSlow now crawls frames and iframes and analyzes those resources as well. There are several other new features and bug fixes described in the release notes including highlighting 404s, better detection of CSS expressions and JavaScript minification, and searching within the YSlow panel.

These features make YSlow stronger at identifying performance improvements for Web 2.0 applications. It’s great that YSlow does even better performance analysis of pages, but be forewarned that your previous YSlow scores will drop if these new-found components exhibit bad performance characteristics. As mentioned in Rule 14 – Make Ajax Cacheable, some of the performance improvements that are readily applied to static content (far future Expires header, gzip compression, minification) can also be applied to Ajax responses. Whether it’s Web 1.0 or Web 2.0, YSlow 0.9 helps you figure out what to fix to make your pages faster for your users.

Stoyan Stefanov goes into more detail on the new features, and you can check out the release notes.

Julien Lecomte has written about CrossSafe, a “safe communication mechanism across documents and across domains”.

We already have some solutions such as the URL fragment identifier or the Flash LocalConnection object, so why did Julien see the need for this?

CrossFrame is a variant of the URL fragment identifier mechanism. In the original technique, the containing page sets the URL fragment identifier of an embedded IFrame (usually via its src attribute), and the IFrame must poll to detect changes in the value of its location.hash property. This technique can be further built upon to allow for 2-way communications between an IFrame and its containing page, or between two distinct IFrames.

The original URL fragment identifier technique has many limitations, many of which can be worked around except maybe for the following:

• It unnecessarily consumes CPU cycles by requiring the receiver to poll.
• It creates “fake” history entries on Safari and Opera.

How does CrossFrame work?

While CrossFrame also has limitations of its own, I find it to be a much cleaner and simpler approach. Here is how it works:

In order to communicate with the mashup hosted in domain Y, the page, hosted in domain X, dynamically creates a hidden IFrame and points it to a special proxy file hosted in domain Y, using the URL fragment identifier to convey the message (step 1) When the special proxy file is loaded in the hidden IFrame, it reads its URL fragment identifier and passes it to a globally accessible function defined in the IFrame hosting the mashup (step 2) using parent.frames['mashup'] to get to it. The same technique can also be used by the mashup to communicate with the page (the proxy will use parent.parent to get to the page) Finally, when all is said and done, the hidden IFrame is automatically removed from the DOM by the library.

To send and receive messages you use the following JavaScript:

Check out the demo, and they read that Julien doesn’t think that ou should use it :)

It’s a busy Sunday evening – first the news on Yahoo Mosh, and now news that Google is working on its own next generation social networking service called Socialstream, possibly to take the spotlight away from the ailing Orkut.

Yahoo Mosh

We don’t know much yet, other than the project exists, it will be launched at mosh.yahoo.com and is being called a “new cool social network product” within Yahoo. No screen shots are available yet. See our earlier post for more.

Google Socialstream

Google Operating System is reporting that Google is sponsoring a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to “rethink and reinvent online social networking.” The project is called Socialstream. Click on the image for a larger view.

The project goal is to “create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.” More information is available deeper in the site:

Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.

The feature set and use cases suggest this will be more of an aggregator of existing social networking sites and features. There is absolutely no indication of whether or not this will be productized and launched at this time.

This video gives a good overview of the interface and features:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0