It is kind of fashionable at the moment to point out the real or imagined shortcomings of OpenID, in light of the elegance of Facebook Connect. But the reality is that together with the other elements of the Open Stack (OAuth, XRD, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), OpenID is entering 2009 with incredible momentum, and tantalizing possibilities. And no one is more capable of demonstrating the possibilities than Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr, who “kicked ass” at the recent Open Stack meetup. Video of his killer presentation with demos has just been posted online. Yes, it’s geeky, and the demos are not pretty to look at, but the new capabilities shown will be turned into product early in 2009 at Plaxo, Google, Yahoo, and MySpace, among others. If you want a glimpse into the near-future of the Social Web, built on the Open Stack, this is 17 minutes of must-see TV:
Also, check out Joseph’s new post reviewing six months of progress on Portable Contacts.
The Real McCrea 
[…] the recent Open Stack Meetup hosted by Digg, I gave a presentation on the state of Portable Contacts, along with several demos of Portable Contacts in action (and our crew from thesocialweb.tv was on […]
Ouch. For geeks, they should know not to leave a cell phone next to a microphone while recording. Some parts of this were unlistenable.
But overall, I didn’t see anything that isn’t being done now – importing contact books from different services and different formats, OpenID logins. Good for Plaxo for continuing to push on it, but its still not implemented in a way for end users that saves them time.
I’d like to see real cross recognition of OpenID login, without having to go to the branded OpenID certifier to login. That should be implemented as a secure web service, but it seems no large company (like Google) is willing to let that go. Even Yahoo makes you leave the Flckr login to use their own on the account you supposedly matched up with a Yahoo ID.
[…] Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo has a nice post describing the problem we need to solve, entitled, Representing Rich Media and Social Network Activities in RSS/Atom Feeds. Also recommend this post from Chris Messina, Where we’re going with Activity Streams. Also for good background, here’s Chris Messina’s talk on Activity Streams at the pre-holiday Open Stack Meetup: […]
[…] John McCrea liveblogged the Activity Streams working session yesterday. You might want to check out the update on all the Activity Stream work Chris Messina has been leading. While you’re at it, watch Joseph Smarr demo how some of these Open Stack pieces come together. […]
[…] asset, its users, that it no longer supports the password anti-pattern? One day Plaxo might switch to Portable Contacts and OAuth to import contacts but in the meantime it has educated its users to […]