Toluu

The Real McCrea

On the Emergence of the Social Web

Obama to OpenID: “Yes, we can!”November 26

Just learned from a a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb that OpenID is now being accepted on the Change.gov, the official transition site for President Elect Obama. I immediately went over to check it out. The experience was a bit messed up, but ulitmately I was able to get it to work. (You first have to use your OpenID to create an account on Intense Debate; once you do that you’re good to go.)

As you can see in the picture below, once logged in, my profile photo showed up, too. (I used an OpenID from JanRain’s myopenid.com service.)

What a great sign of new possibilities, as we look forward to the first Internet-savvy administration. Can we get OpenID broadly established in 2009? Yes, we can! Can we use the Social Web’s new “open stack” to bring about a more participatory era in American democracy? Yes, we can!

We discussed Obama’s Social Web strategy recently on The Social Web TV:

More commentary by David Recordon

Yahoo and AOL Enhancing OpenID with Data Portability via the “Simple Registration” ExtensionNovember 20

As many of my readers know, the user experience (UX) for OpenID has been a source of confusion and an impediment to broader adoption. That gave rise to an OpenID UX Summit a few weeks ago, hosted by Yahoo and attended by Google, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, Facebook and many others. It also was a major focus of sessions and late-night discussion at last week’s Internet Identity Workshop. Today, we get to see some of the fruits of those efforts, as Yahoo rolls out (in a limited test) a new implementation of OpenID, currently live with just two test sites, Plaxo and Jyte; and AOL releases preview support for data portability via SREG.

Yahoo’s post describes the details:

Today, we are announcing the start of a limited test of the Simple Registration extension for the Yahoo! OpenID service. The Simple Registration extension allows OpenID RPs to request user profile data from the OpenID provider. Yahoo! will be providing Yahoo! OpenID users the ability to share the following Simple Registration fields for this initial test: Full Name, Nick Name, Email Address, Gender, Language and Timezone. The Yahoo! OpenID user will have full control on whether to s

CitySearch Goes Social with Great Facebook Connect ImplementationNovember 19

CitySearch relaunched today, with a sweeping makeover that is my favorite Facebook Connect implementation so far. You should check it out to get a glimpse into the near-future emergence of the Social Web. I used my Facebook account to create a CitySearch account in a just a few clicks. I saw some of my Facebook friends were already there. I checked out their reviews. I got inspired to write a review, too (of Toronado, one of my favorite pubs in the world). And I agreed to have that review (and future ones) shared on Facebook. And that should power a virtuous cycle of discovery, adoption, and sharing.

Congrats to the CitySearch and Facebook Connect teams. Well done!

Now, what I really want is for the sharing options to inc

Facebook, Microsoft and Data PortabilityNovember 14

Michael Arrington has a great piece up on TechCrunch entitled “The Very Curious Microsoft-Facebook User Data Relationship“. In it, he shines a spotlight on a most curious thing — that Facebook has given Microsoft access to data on Facebook users that they have said they would not give to anyone, as it would violate users’ privacy. Specifically, he shows screenshots of an import of a Facebook friends list into Microsoft’s IM client, Messenger, in which the user ends up with the email addresses of all of the their friends (and can then connect with them or invite them to Messenger).

As you may recall, this was at the heart of the controversy now know as “Scoblegate,” in which Plaxo had created a Facebook importer that brought a user’s friends list, including email address over into the Plaxo address book. Aside from the interesting questions Michael Arrington raises, I would add this observation: It is great to see this functionality out there, live since March, without a single bit of controversy. That speaks to the utility of data portability. If social networking really is about real people and real relationships, it would be great if sharing information were real sharing of information, not tethered-sharing , which is essentially “social DRM”.

OpenSocial Birthday, Open Stack and the Smarr and Engel ShowNovember 14

The first of my videos from today’s anniversary event for OpenSocial is now up. The following segment was recorded late in the day at a breakout session led by Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr and MySpace’s Max Engel. Joseph and Max did a great tag-team discussion on the new “Open Stack” and how it can take us beyond the widget phase of social apps to the emerging world of the Social Web. The videos include several live demos that string together open spec building blocks, inlcuding OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, XRDS-Simple, and the OpenSocial RESTful APIs.

I was so impressed with Joseph and Max, that I really want to encourage them to work up a longer tutorial session that we can share with the world via video. If you have interest in how the Open Stack will bring about the open Social Web, you’ll definitely enjoy the following two clips. (Clip two to follow once it’s encoded on Viddler.)

Part I