Category Archives: OpenID

OpenID

New and Slightly Improved

I finally had some time this weekend to work on a bunch of things that I have been wanting to do with my blog. The short status is:

  • WordPress 2.5 / K2 Upgrades = Success
  • Administration Improvements = Success
  • hCard = Success
  • OpenID delegation = Success
  • OpenID plugin for comments = Fail

WordPress 2.5

The biggest task was the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 (2.5.1 really). I’ve been putting this off partly because it is a lot of work for me and partly because I had to wait for K2 official support for WordPress 2.5, which was released a couple of weeks ago. I played around with some nightly builds before that, but none of them seemed as stable as I would have liked, so I decided to wait for official support.

The reason it takes so much time for the upgrade is that I’ve done a bit of hacking on the php files for K2 without doing much documentation, so it took me a while to sort out what I had changed. I also took the time in this version to carefully comment begin / end statements using a consistent search string. Now, for the next big upgrade, I can easily search the files for that string to find all of my tweaks.

I also had to do a bit of work on my custom css overrides in a few places where K2 made new changes.

Luckily, I have a pretty good setup on my MacBook with a local php/mysql/wordpress install where I can do most of the testing, breaking, and fixing without disrupting the blog, so the blog should have been up most of the morning despite my working on it for 6+ hours.

Administration Improvements

I installed the WordPress Database Backup (wp-db-backup), and scheduled weekly backups. My hosting provider does nightly backups, but I thought it would be a good idea to have my own backups. It will also make it easier for me to do backups prior to installing plugins / upgrades / etc., which I have been doing manually prior to installing the plugin.

I also used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to perform the upgrades. I love this plugin!

hCard

I really needed to get some proper contact information on my blog, and I decided that hCard would be a good way to do it, and it gave me an excuse to play with microformats. Now, people can see my contact info, machines can read it, and you can add it to your address book with a simple click.

OpenID delegation

I finally got around to setting up Fast Wonder Blog as a delegate for my OpenID account at ClaimID. Not having this earlier was sheer laziness on my part.

OpenID plugin for comments

Grrrrr. OK, this one was a big fail for me. I tried a bunch of stuff, but I kept running into one pesky error that was not occurring in my local environment. I installed wp-openid, and it worked great in my local environment, but on my hosted production copy of the blog, I kept getting this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: error() in /home/content/f/a/s/fastwonderblog/html/wp-content/plugins/openid/store.php on line 134

I tried commenting out the error to rule out an issue with the error message itself, I re-built database tables, uninstalled / reinstalled, activated / deactivated all with no luck. I’m hoping I can get Chris or Will to take a look at the error report and suggest a fix. I’d love to have OpenID support, but it looks like it isn’t in the cards for me today.

community, OpenID, scott kveton, social networking

Fast Wonder Community Podcast: Data Portability and Social Networking in Online Communities with Scott Kveton

I just published the 5th Fast Wonder Community Podcast today: Data Portability and Social Networking in Online Communities with Scott Kveton. Scott and I discussed a variety of topics related to online communities including data portability, OpenID, and social networking. Listen to the podcast to hear the entire discussion.

If you have any suggestions for people you would like to see interviewed on a future podcast, please let me know!

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via RSS or iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

facebook, google, identity, OpenID

Google, Facebook and Plaxo Join the DataPortability.org Party

The DataPortability Workgroup dropped a bombshell this morning by announcing:

the inclusion of Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) to the DataPortability Workgroup.

Quoted from: Chris Saad (one of the drivers behind dataportability.org) on the Particls.Blog

Marshall Kirkpatrick added some additional insight into this announcement on ReadWriteWeb:

The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history – what’s being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data.

…

If these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together – magic could happen. Hopefully they can work appropriately with the other members of the working group, bleeding edge consultants and representatives of smaller and in many cases more user-centric companies. If so, perhaps we can move appropriately into a future of powerful personalization and logically augmented activity online – while avoiding Minority Report-style dystopian scenarios.

Innovation on the internet is in its early, early days. The participation of representatives from Google and Facebook in this initiative could prove key in the continued development of what’s possible, instead of the early suffocation of what could have been.

Quoted from ReadWriteWeb

I have blogged here many times about the idea of online identity, but the potential for data portability that has been more of hope than a reality until now. I already use ClaimID as my primary OpenID provider. Ideally, I would love to manage my identity through an OpenID provider of my choice, but with more options to carry some of my data around the internet along with this identity. I hope to eventually be able to have a centrally managed picture, bio, profile information, and more that I can choose to share with online social networking sites (like Facebook) allowing me to maintain better control over my information and manage changes. Changing basic information (job change, phone number, etc.) can be a really labor intensive task for me. I remember going through this recently when I joined Jive in May. I would be willing to bet that you can still find old profiles on web 2.0 sites that still have me listed as working at Compiere or even Intel!

Data portability is one of the biggest problems that web 2.0 companies and users face, and I have been following dataportability.org with interest, but a healthy amount of skepticism. With the addition of Google and Facebook, I have much more confidence that we will start to see this hope move closer to the reality of data portability over time.

Jive has been focused for years on building our products using existing standards, and we are excited about what this might mean for Clearspace and other products. You can read Sam Lawrence’s perspective on this discussion and what it might mean to Jive over on the Jive Talks blog.

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

OpenID

OpenID 2.0

Last week, the final version of OpenID 2.0 was released. Chris Messina has a great post highlighting those companies who said they would adopt and support OpenID but have not, companies who should support it, and companies already embracing OpenID.

I’m a huge fan of OpenID, especially for online applications. If you don’t already support OpenID, now would be a great time to start!

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

"one laptop per child", barcamp, barcampportland, bubble tea, collective intelligence, community, conference, dawn foster, geek, General, olpc, open source, OpenID, portland, unconference, werewolf, women

BarCamp Portland was Awesome

OK, as an organizer of the event, I am probably not the most neutral party; however, I do think the we managed to pull of a great BarCamp here in Portland. First of all, a huge thank you to Eva, David, and the rest of the crew at CubeSpace who generously gave us the run of the facility, were an amazing help, let us stay until 11pm both nights, and were extremely flexible when the registrations soared out of control the 3 days leading up to the event from our expected attendance of 125 to a final count of about 250 attendees. Also a huge thank you to Raven Zachary, co-organizer and partner in crime for the event, and the rest of the planning team: Carl Johnson, LaVonne Reimer, Audrey Eschright, Patrick Sullivan, Sioux Fleming, Kelly Mackin, and Rashid Ahmed. Each person on this list was a tremendous help. Todd was also an enormous help: staying up late to help draw the grid; bringing me bubble tea; getting last minute materials cut at Kinkos, putting up with my crap as my grouchiness escalated during final preparations, and much more.

During the initial planning of BarCamp Portland, we thought that would be really cool if we could get maybe 75-100 people at Portland’s first BarCamp. As people began signing up, we thought that 125 was a pretty realistic number (this is what we budgeted for). A week or two before the event, we had 125-150 people signed up, and we felt really good about that number. As we moved closer to the Friday start of BarCamp, the numbers escalated rapidly to 274. Based on signups at the registration desks, we think we had about 250 people physically present at the event. Our sponsors were very generous in making last minute increases in sponsorship funding to provide additional food for the extra people.

A few neat things about BarCamp Portland:

Thanks to everyone who attended. A BarCamp event is only successful if the people who attend make it successful. We had an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun crowd leading to an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun event!

blogging, collaboration, comments, community, Jyte, OpenID, sxsw

Thoughts on Anonymity and Identity in Communities from SXSW

I just listened to an interesting panel at sxsw on World Domination via Collaboration. One of the many great conversations during this discussion related to anonymity in communities. One panelist allows anonymous comments on her blog because she wants to know what people really think, even if she don’t like it or agree with it. Another panelist mentioned Slashdot’s use of anonymous coward, which highlights the fact that people value comments more from people who share a name and identity. I also allow anonymous comments on my blog (with captcha and other spam filters). Some trolls hide behind anonymity to say nasty things, but I have been lucky so far to only have a few of those comments. I find that the vast majority of people commenting will chose to share a name or other identity, but I am not comfortable forcing it on people. I prefer to have people share an identity because they want to, not because it is required in order to leave a comment. Like many people, I value the comments from people who associate their comments with an identity over those who choose to remain anonymous.

The panel members talked about how people in a community can be anonymous from the standpoint of not sharing a real name / real identity, but having a log in and identity on the site. This is a better solution from a community perspective where people tend to interact together over a longer period of time. Community members get to know each other based on the site identity. I have noticed this recently with my interactions on Jyte. Some people share a real name, others share some other identity, but you get to know these people based on this identity whether it is an “anonymous” identity or a “real world” identity. Jyte uses OpenID, which is a great way to facilitate identity management within a community, since it gives people control over their identities and allows them to use their identity (or multiple identities) across sites.

I am looking forward to more really great sessions at sxsw this weekend!

JanRain, OpenID, scott kveton, wordpress.com

OpenID Gains Additional Traction with WordPress.com

I have become a big proponent of OpenID lately. I think it is a great solution to the growing problem of managing your online identity and login across many sites.

Today, WordPress.com announced that they would begin supporting OpenID:

“OpenID is a new standard that hopes to alleviate some of the pain, and we’ve just made it available to everyone who has a WordPress.com blog. This means you can sign in to a growing number of sites using your existing WordPress.com account.” (Quote from WordPress.com)

This is great news, but so far, it looks like a one way deal. You can use WordPress.com OpenID credentials to log into other sites, but you cannot use other OpenID providers to post to WordPress.com:

“Unfortunately, you cannot login to WordPress (at least from what I can tell) with an external OpenID. This means that WordPress.com is just a provider of OpenID’s and not a consumer of OpenID’s. So I can’t use my MyOpenID or my LiveJournal OpenID post comments on WordPress.com blogs. Hopefully support for that will be coming soon.” (Quote from Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain)

I suspect that WordPress.com is testing the waters by becoming an OpenID to provider as a first step. If it is successful, I would not be surprised if they decided to accept OpenID’s to login and post to WordPress.com.

barcamp, identity, JanRain, Jyte, OpenID

Jyte – Claims, Votes, and Cred

I have been playing around with Jyte, a recently released JanRain product, this weekend. It is a way to manage your identity via claims and cred:

Jyte is a place to make claims about yourself, others, or just about anything. It’s a place for web surfers to see what you are up to and what you’re thinking. It’s a place to learn more about friends, and for others to learn about you through your claims, votes, and cred. It’s a place to build out your social network and share it with other sites. It’s a place to use your shiny new OpenID, and a place for people who see your OpenID around the web to discover your world. (Quote from the Jyte Blog)

You should check it out, but as a warning … it is highly addictive.

advertising, identity, meebo, OpenID, recentchangescamp, superbowl, technorati, wiki, YouTube

Super Bowl and RecentChangesCamp Weekend

If you are nostalgic for the dot com Super Bowl ads circa 2000, you might want to check out the SuperDotComAds from Meebo, Technorati, and others on YouTube.

Where will I be this weekend instead of watching the Super Bowl? With all of the other geeks at RecentChangesCamp, of course! I just Tivo the game to watch the commercials anyway.

RecentChangesCamp is free, and it runs from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon in Portland. If you are in the area, you should check it out. Proposed topics include wikis, collaboration, identity / OpenID, and more!

conference, identity, JanRain, OpenID, portland

OpenID, Identity Management, and Single Sign-on

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my recent change of heart about OpenID and identity management in general. As we begin to rely more heavily and put more of ourselves into web 2.0 and other online environments, identity management becomes increasingly important.

We have an upcoming hackfest here in Portland on January 17th called MashPit: OpenID for anyone wanting to learn more about OpenID in a hands-on environment working with the experts to make OpenID work for your sites and apps. If you’ve ever wanted single sign-on and OpenID, but did not know where to start or had questions about implementation, this event would be a great place to start!

The Details:
MashPit: OpenID
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 from 4:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Where: JanRain World Headquarters
RSVP here to attend this free event.
Visit the wiki for more information.