OpenID Foundation Finally Grabs @openid Twitter Account

The OpenID protocol, aimed to authenticate users in a decentralized way, helping individuals own their own identities instead of requiring unique accounts for every service, has had something of an ironic issue for some time - given that the OpenID Foundation didn't actually own their own ID for one of the more popular discussion forums out there - Twitter. Today, this issue can be put to rest as Facebook employee and open source advocate David Recordon announced this afternoon they had gained access to the @openid account - giving folks a central place to keep tabs on updates to the protocol.

While OpenID at times has been pilloried for being obtuse, making logins more complicated rather than less, the project has helped push the concept of decentralized identities away from individual domains, including last week's news that Flickr had adopted the standard. The protocol, developed by now Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005, while at Six Apart, has seen deployment at a significant and influential number of Web services, and has corporate members including Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal and Yahoo! on the foundation's board of directors. Ironically, nobody from Twitter is involved on the board.

The release of the account may or may not have been related to yesterday's OpenID OAuth Summit, held at Facebook headquarters, which saw stakeholders from a variety of tech companies, including Kevin Marks of BT, Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr of Google and Tantek Çelik, computer scientist at Microformats.org, participate to potentially discuss the differences between the at times complimentary but competing formats. Also, the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) kicks off today in Mountain View, where many of these same folks will be participating.

Debate on OpenID versus OAuth continues to rage on the Web, of course. Recent entries include the Halloween post on Codebase: OpenID OR OAuth – That is the Question. Regardless of the eventual resolution, proposed as a new agreement called OpenID Connect, adoption of open standards and reduced complexity is a good thing. You can now follow OpenID's happenings at @openid.

Our Doings: You Upload The Moment, They Organize It By Date

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Our Doings is a simple and unique photo sharing service. While it may not have the lengthy feature set and large community of a Flickr or Picasa, that's okay, as it's primarily a much smaller operation, and the feature set built into the service leaves it standing in a league of its own, in my opinion.

Getting started with Our Doings takes less then five minutes. Once you register for an account, you have the option of creating a custom URL for your photos, such as the one I created for testing purposes, or you can let the system automatically generate one for you. Both URLs can be viewed by the public. The key difference is the indexing option, which you can select on or off. If you select "no indexing", search engines are advised not to index your URL.


Uploading is made easy. Give it everything you can throw at it!


The service gives you a multitude of ways to send photos into the system.

• e-mail to publish
  
• Web Publishing Wizard lets you upload straight from Windows XP or Vista
• Picasa photo albums button
• Web form to upload individual photos
• Ability to upload a zip archive of up to 100MB

Why do I like this service so much? Automatic organization of your photos by date!

While the service has plenty of nook and crannies, this is by far the best feature yet. There is not one service out there that I could find that automatically organizes and sorts your photos by date. This is not a feature currently offered by any of the other major photo sharing services currently on the market.


For someone like me, who is not meticulous with organizing my photos, this feature is a godsend. I have dozens of folders on my desktop with random images taken at any given time. The images from a specific occasion in time, such as a birthday party or wedding are easy to organize. It's simply a matter of creating a photo album titled "someones wedding" and dumping all the correlating images into that album. The other hundreds of photos are taken on random occasions, random days and so forth. Most recently, with the birth of my daughter, my wife or I will grab the camera at any given time to capture that perfect Kodak moment of our daughter doing something that warrants a digital snap. It's these Kodak moments that I specifically would like to know the day that it had happened and reflected on the photo album. Now with this service, I can begin to upload the hundreds of images that I have stored on my desktop, and have them chronologically organized by the date that they were taken. This core feature will keep me using the service hands down.

It gets better. Site integration with your favorite Web 2.0 services:


Ourdoings.com offers integration with a lot of the popular Web 2.0 services, such as Disqus. Oh, and did you see FriendFeed is on that list too? They implemented SUP, which means if you configure it for FriendFeed, your images will appear on the site in real time. I configured mine to import my images into FriendFeed, you can see my feed here. It took no longer than 15 seconds for the images to import onto my feed. Without the implementation of SUP, you would be waiting anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour for photos from other photo sharing services to import into FriendFeed. You could always uses the manual refresh link, but that defeats the whole purpose.

You also get a Media RSS URL for all of your photo albums:

Media RSS is a special type of RSS feed that contains rich media assets like video, audio and imagery. Many media sharing and news sites publish content using Media RSS. This is an added bonus, and one feature I'm sure the bigger competitors in the space do not currently offer. Do you have a wireless photo frame? Without getting too technical, it solves the nagging problem of photo orientation.This explains it in more depth. This is something I will use for my wireless photo frame that I have been eyeing for purchase for some time now.

In closing:
I'm thoroughly impressed with this service. It's the simplicity of it, along with the automatic organization of my photos by date, that has sold me. I don't need all the fancy bells and whistles that some of the other bigger name services offer. I have a Picasa account that suits me just fine as a backup. Will this be a replacement for Picasa? It's strongly looking like it. I have not made the switch yet, as I only have tested the service out for less than an hour or so. I would like to see some photo editing features such as cropping and red eye reduction added, but in the meantime this service is something worth looking into.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Never Say Never Online. We're Keeping Records, You Know.

Two integral characteristics to the Web are that it is first, constantly changing, and second, practically everything is saved. So if you, like me, and many others, have ever said you will "never" do something, or will "quit" doing something never to return, you're just setting yourself up to be wrong. And once you undo that promise, you can look pretty silly in the process. So, if you are wavering in whether or not you will use a product, or if you're thinking of walking away from one you have already tried, it probably makes sense to keep the dialog internal, instead of sharing with the masses.

First, let me point out how dumb I was for trying this.

In January of 2007, I said, Why I Stopped Using IM and Won't Use Twitter. I wrote:

"What is said over IM is very rarely business, and prevents people from getting work done. It's a significant time-waster, and a technology whose time has come and gone. The idea that I would take it up a notch and tell Twitter my every step is yet another task that would get in the way of my actually working, so we're not interested."

So... yeah, how did that go? Well, a full year later (a long time hold out for me), I announced I "jumped the shark" on Twitter, and started using it. Almost a year later, I've now updated my Twitter account more than 1,400 times, and am following or being followed by about 4,000 people each direction.

In March of 2007, I took things a step further, and thought I'd be smart about saying not just one but TEN services I would "never" use. In a post titled, "Ten Geeky Technologies Not Coming to Our House", I listed Skype, Twitter, Linux, Plaxo, MySpace, BeBo, Piczo, XBox, PS3, the Wii, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo! IM, GTalk, Delicous, Flickr and EV-DO as things that would never make it in our home. In case you were counting, yes, that's more than 10 items, but I had grouped the game consoles, IM clients and social networks, for example.

So where do we stand? I have a Skype account, which I've used maybe three times in total. I have a Plaxo Pulse account. I signed up with a MySpace account, just to search for times my content was being used or linked to, we are big fans of the Nintendo Wii in our home, I've used Google Talk several times from within GMail, and I bookmarked almost 2,000 different Web sites on my Delicious account this year alone. Add onto that the fact I use my Flickr account for some photos of the twins, though I prefer SmugMug, and I look like a complete fool. Clearly, the mistake was mine to even say I was going to ignore these products, because in the interim, not only did those products get better, but I found more than an edge case to use them.

The same rule applies for those who might be using a service, and then loudly say they are quitting, never to return. Why do that, unless you're either looking for attention, or hoping others will join your cause?

For example, Mark Hopkins (formerly of Mashable) quit FriendFeed back in October, during a very political time for the site. He is back, of course, after a two-month hiatus. Similarly, when directeur, the creator of NoiseRiver, said he was going to leave FriendFeed (which we covered in October as well), the vacation didn't last all that long. He was back and active on the site within days.

More visibly, Jason Calacanis claimed in November that he was retiring from blogging, preferring to use an e-mail list to get his word out. While the e-mail list is alive and kicking, and growing, he has started posting to his blog again, practically every day, even if just to post pictures, or add a copy of his newsletter. It happens.

In May of 2007, we covered a topic I called "blog fatigue", specifically pointing to a few folks who were taking a breather from their sites. Truth is, we could all use a breather sometimes, be it from the blogging, or any services, but rather than say we're never going back, or never going to use something, it makes more sense to both keep an open mind, and probably, a closed mouth. I've proven I can be a leading indicator of nonsense, so don't expect me to tell you what I'll never use. I just might change my mind later.