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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 much-anticipated Portable Contacts Summit has kicked off, with folks from companies large and small and representatives of various open-spec communities. Joseph Smarr of Plaxo is leading the opening session and is going through a bunch of demos of working code.
Some quotes:
“The Portable Contacts train has left the station, and it’s a bullet train.”
“I’ve got more demos than I have Firefox tabs.”
“One good pipe deserves another.”
Joseph is demoing the power of having technical alignment between Portable Contacts and OpenSocial RESTFul APIs. What that means is that any site that is OpenSocial compliant will be Portable Contacts compliant — without having to do any additional work!
Folks in attendance include people who work at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Plaxo, Six Apart, Seesmic, JanRain, Skydeck, ShopIt, Current.TV, Interscope Records, and more. Today’s event is hosted by MySpace.
12:00 Joseph demoing interop between Plaxo and MySpace.
12:05 Now a demo of JanRain’s myOpenID with support for Portable Contacts
12:07 Now on to Google, another instance of compliance via OpenSocial RESTful APIs
12:08 iGoogle, GMail, and Orkut (all leveraging the same backend)
12:09 Brian Ellin of JanRain about to do a demo of an end-user application
12:11 Brain implemented Portable Contacts last night in Ruby
lunch break
1:00 About to resume. Saw amazing discussions over lunch. I won’t name names, but some would be shocked by the various pairings of competitors breaking bread together
1:15 Joseph leading a deep dive on the spec. Lots of questions, discussion.
1:30 Lots of great questions and discussion about OAuth and XRDS-Simple
3:00 Wow! Just barely made it all the way through the spec. Impressive. Everyone is fried.
3:30 Unconference phase now, but really informal; organically forming conversation circles.
4:15 About to do the next steps and wrap up
Kevin Marks, of Google, is doing a nice job live tweeting the event. He’s @kevinmarks on Twitter.
UPDATE:
Great posts from the team at ShopIt and from data portability maven Daniela Barbosa.
And another fine post from the godfather of open, Marc Canter.
Here are a few photos so far:
It’s certainly a big week, what with the Hadron Collider finally coming on line, raising existential risk questions for the planet, as physicists attempt to recreate the conditions immediately after the Big Bang that gave birth to our universe. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, developers are attempting to give birth to a truly open Social Web, by stitching together for the first time the open spec building blocks: OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and PortableContacts.
You can participate yourself at the PortableContacts Hackathon this evening, hosted by SixApart. Or you can get the quick overview in this video podcast I did with Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr.
