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In this week’s episode of The Social Web TV, Joseph Smarr and I are joined by special guests, Dirk Balfanz and Breno de Medeiros of Google to discuss this week’s rollout of Hybrid OpenID/OAuth and a “Two-Click Signup” experiment between Google and Plaxo. Check it out:
An encouraging sign of progress today, as Google and Plaxo roll out support for a hybrid OpenID/Auth approach, designed to improve the user experience for OpenID.
I wrote the official post for Plaxo.
And here’s Google’s post.
Cool beans.
FDR was the radio President. JFK was the TV President. Obama is the Internet President. How should this administration leverage the Open Stack to revitalize our democracy? Chris Messina, Joseph Smarr, and I tackle that question in the latest episode of The Social Web TV:
The acceleration in the emergence of the Social Web continues, confronting David Recordon and me with the challenge of trying to cover six different news items in one less-than-15-minute video podcast. We found a way to weave them together in a narrative arc that starts with some things relating to activity streams (or “feeds”) then segues into OpenID momentum. Topic discussed include: Yahoo adds 20 external feeds; iLike integrates with Google Friend Connect; Plaxo integrates with Amazon; Google adjusts resourcing for Dodgeball and Jauiku; Six Apart enhances support for OpenID in TypePad Connect; and OpenID reaches more than 30,000 sites and more than half a billion accounts. Check it out:
Two nice pieces yesterday on how OpenID picked up steam in 2008. David Recordon’s post at OpenID.net is simply entitled 2008:Momentum. It offers a great review of the progress made last year:
2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community created significant momentum moving toward mainstream adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more than tripled1. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half a billion OpenID enabled accounts.
He supports the claim of momentum with no fewer than 11 proof points!
The other post is from Wired.com’s Michael Calore, entitled Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down. David Recorodon and I are both quoted in the piece. Michael focused on the traction OpenID is showing in the area of blog commenting, which led to this great quote from David:
“Blog commenting is not a niche,” he says. “Social activity on blogs in total dwarfs social activity on any particular social network.”
“If anything, the success of OpenID and Facebook Connect in situations such as commenting on blogs, coupled with a number of high-profile sites, will continue pushing this idea toward a mainstream audience that cares about being able to easily sign in, find people they know, and share what they’re doing on the web.”
Let’s hope that the incredible gains OpenID made in 2008 will be matched and exceeded in 2009. With strong support from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Six Apart, Plaxo and more than 30,000 other sites, I think that’s fairly likely.
Also worth checking out is David’s other recent post, this one at Six Apart’s blog, detailing enhancements to Typepad Connect, with expanded support for OpenID, including user-friendly click-the-logo sign-in via Google and Yahoo accounts!
The concept of an “open social network,” one that gets its news feed not from within its own walls, but rather by aggregating lifestreams from all over the open Web, first appeared with the launch of Plaxo Pulse in August 2007. [Reminder/disclosure: I head up marketing at Plaxo. 
]
While Plaxo stayed heads-down focused on serving its traditional 30- to 50-year-old professional demographic with private sharing and conversations based on a family/friend/business connection model, FriendFeed came roaring into the space with a service as public and extensible as Twitter, and quickly became a darling of the early-adopter and blogger/influencer crowd.
The two services have continued to innovate down different pathways and to help map out a blueprint that we are now seeing adopted by some of the largest social networks (Facebook and MySpace) and largest of mainstream Internet companies (Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL). So, let’s take a look at the traffic trend for these two pioneers, through the lens of the latest data from Compete.com. [Note: Compete.com only looks at U.S. traffic, and like all other tracking services, provides an approximate tally.]
While each service experienced a month here or there of sideways drift or month-over-month declines in monthly unique visitors, the clear overall trend for 2008 is one of strong growth. Plaxo in particular is showing encouraging signs of vibrancy at the end of 2008.
The key question now: with much larger players putting all their chips on the webwide lifestream aggregation model, can either of both of the two pioneers grow fast enough in their respective niches to carve out a great longterm position in the marketplace?
My belief is that the answer is “yes,” as the Web itself goes social, and the Social Web goes open, creating a wave of innovation that will favor the most agile of aggregators. And as a passionate user of both services, I sure hope I’m right!
Up in San Francisco for another open spec community gathering, this one focused on working toward standardization of “activity streams,” the flow of user-generated content which is the lifeblood of the emerging Social Web. This Activity Streams Meetup is being hosted at Six Apart, with David Recordon guiding the event. As Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr tweeted, we hope this all leads to “more structured metadata in feeds”.
As usual, I’ll sprinkle in a mix of photos and observations, but not attempt to take anything approaching full notes. In addition to Six Apart, there are folks here or from Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, among others. That means there’s representation for projects that span DiSo, OpenSocial, Open Stack, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, MySpaceID, among others. Sweet!
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. And for more background, here’s Chris Messina’s talk on Activity Streams at the pre-holiday Open Stack Meetup:
And now, some photos of the Activity Stream Meetup:
Lots of good discussion, trying to get everyone on the same page about the problem we’re trying to solve and what we can hope to accomplish today. As people are sharing all sorts of stuff from a rapidly growing list of services (examples just for photos: Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, etc.). Every social network is either a webwide lifestream aggregator today (early examples: Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed), or are becoming one quickly (examples: Facebook and MySpace). And every aggregator faces the same set of challenges that arise from the chaos of there being no standard for how to format the feed of user-shared content. No common convention for naming of objects or verbs. This is the classic problem space for the Open Stack of OpenID, OAuth, XRD, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial.
Great to see the active participation from Luke Shepard from Facebook, who just shared some of the problems of complexity they experienced by having too much flexibility in the verb space. I think he just said “combinatorial explosion” to describe it.
Cool, just noticed that Ian Kennedy is live streaming the event via his mobile phone and Kyte. So now you can watch it so you don’t miss anything!
Chris Messina takes to the white board:
David Recordon of SixApart, who is running the Meetup, with Joseph Smarr:
Okay, now we’re about to go over a draft spec… Martin Atkins of Six Apart is now going over at high-level a review of a draft spec.
Now, Monica Keller of MySpace is jumping in, showing an alternative proposal and getting lots of feedback.
Discussion of reviving Media RSS vs. starting with Atom Media.
David Recordon is showing a demo of a Six Apart implementation done against the current draft spec in answer to a question from Joseph Smarr about how firm the draft feels, and whether we have any good insights from early implementations. It’s a demo of an API which transforms existing Atom and RSS feeds from sites like Flickr, Twitter, Digg, and blogs into new feeds (which can also be aggregated together) that include markup from the draft Activity Streams specifications being discussed. Along with the work from MySpace, this constitutes one of the first two implementations of the draft specification.
What a great working session! We’re two-and-a-half hours in an still going strong. Good discussion now about the importance (and complexities) of handing “friending” events, whether those are bi-directional or “follows”. Some differing thoughts here from the DiSo folks vs. the big social networks. Good sharing of insights from Facebook and Plaxo.
It’s after 6:00, and we’re wrapping up. Great session. Great participation from sites large and small and from folks just looking out for the open Social Web at large.
UPDATE: Check out Marshall Kirkpatrick’s excellent piece on the event on ReadWriteWeb (which also was syndicated to the New York Times) and Marc Canter’s thoughtful post, DiSo Activity Stream Standard.
