Aehso's Output » yahoo

Google on Microsoft

Administrator — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:18:10 +0000

Yahoo! Getting OpenID?

aehso — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:39:44 +0000

Simon Willison has noticed that Flicker photostream pages now have rel links to an as yet inactive OpenID 2 identity provider. He also highlights the important point that it appears that Yahoo! (owners of Flickr) are developing a general OpenID infrastructure that can be used by their other properties, augmenting their proprietary BBAuth scheme.

This is A Good Thing.

OpenID 2.0 and OAuth Core 1.0

aehso — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:09:02 +0000

The word ‘open’ has been abused terribly in recent months (I’m looking at you OpenSocial and you AT&T/Verizon) but the recently completed OpenID 2.0 and OAuth Core 1.0 specifications are truly open. They really should be on the radar of every self respecting web developer that works on websites/APIs that require authentication (OpenID) and authorization/access-control (OAuth). Both are integral to any hope we have of evolving the existing world wide web into a truly open social network (or the giant global graph as timbl now calls it)

If you are looking for primers then you need go no further than Simon Willison’s How To use OpenID screencast (5 mins) and Explaining OAuth.

That said, minimal OpenID implementations won’t solve all authentication headaches. Phishing is a problem so I suspect OpenID enabled sites will need to employ white list providers as Tim and Dare highlighted this a while back.
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Now we (the web community that is) need two things to happen.

We need the big online identity silos like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, Facebook and MySpace – the sites whose login page average web users trust – to step up to the plate and act as OpenID providers.
We need the big API sites like Google Maps/Charts/Base/…, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!/Flickr, Facebook to start working on enabling OAuth access to their APIs.

Note the overlap in the two lists above – yep, those guys own this part of the web. Which will be brave enough to move first? With final specifications in hand, no excuses, please go forth and implement and lets end this www account/data access hell we all live in.

Top 1% of searchers perform 13% of all web searches

aehso — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:08:41 +0000

Interesting analysis by Jeremy Crane of how web searches are distributed by user:

the top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month. If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%

I suspect I’m in that top 1%, CTRL-K is probably the Firefox keyboard shortcut I use most of all. This does imply that search engine usage stats would swing dramatically if these power-searchers were to switch engines…

A Future of Media.

aehso — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:16:06 +0000

From Read/Write Web (comment # 2 was NOT from me):

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV – man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer – or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…