Monday, February 26, 2007
The Door Whisperer
I'm playing around a bit more with our Journals mobile upload feature. It not only lets you blog photos, but also short videos. Here's my son learning how to command doors:
Thursday, February 22, 2007
OpenID podcast (idcast.org)
John Mills just put up the podcast for the first idCast discussion from yesterday. I really enjoyed talking with Jon, Gabe, Drummond, Scott, Mike, and Dmitry about OpenID. I think the discussion around XFN, microformats, and OpenID is just getting started. (And I apologize to everyone for my flaky mike or network or whatever the problem was -- Jon did a great job of cleaning things up.)
The value of open identity
This seems to be turning into OpenID Month, but Fred Stutzman just posted a great explanatory article about OpenID at dev.aol.com: OpenID and the Value of Connected Identity. It does an especially nice job going beyond the single-signon aspect and talking about the value of connecting all your the various relationship networks together, with you in control over how they're used.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Your blog is your OpenID
As of this morning's Journals update, you now have a couple of new choices to use for your OpenID:
When would you want to use one of these instead of http://openid.aol.com/screenname? It depends on what you're doing. If you're leaving a comment over on a LiveJournal, you may want to point back at your blog so they can come and comment on yours. This lets you do that in a verified way. If you have more than one blog, the first URL gives a synopsis of all your blogs, and you may want to hand that out instead. These are for experimentation only at this point and may change, so please don't use one of these for a permanent identity quite yet. They both delegate to http://openid.aol.com/screenname so all three are effectively transparent aliases of each other. Which one you use is up to you.
Another subtle change: When someone comments on your blog, their screen name now links to a search for their AOL Journals. So when you click on their signature, you can get to their list of blogs if they have any. This makes it slightly easier to go back and comment on their blog.
We're also experimenting with hCard support. The signatures on entries are marked up so that hCard processors will pick up on the fact that they name a person that has a URL -- and that URL is an OpenID. We don't do this for comments yet. I think we'd want to give commenters control over how much information gets published about them. Combining this with OpenID opens some very interesting possibilities. People who opt in would be able to verifiably link their comments across OpenID-enabled sites, automatically track responses to their comments, or find other people who write similar comments. And a lot more things I haven't thought of.
http://journals.aol.com/screenname
- or -
http://journals.aol.com/screenname/blogname
- or -
http://journals.aol.com/screenname/blogname
When would you want to use one of these instead of http://openid.aol.com/screenname? It depends on what you're doing. If you're leaving a comment over on a LiveJournal, you may want to point back at your blog so they can come and comment on yours. This lets you do that in a verified way. If you have more than one blog, the first URL gives a synopsis of all your blogs, and you may want to hand that out instead. These are for experimentation only at this point and may change, so please don't use one of these for a permanent identity quite yet. They both delegate to http://openid.aol.com/screenname so all three are effectively transparent aliases of each other. Which one you use is up to you.
Another subtle change: When someone comments on your blog, their screen name now links to a search for their AOL Journals. So when you click on their signature, you can get to their list of blogs if they have any. This makes it slightly easier to go back and comment on their blog.
We're also experimenting with hCard support. The signatures on entries are marked up so that hCard processors will pick up on the fact that they name a person that has a URL -- and that URL is an OpenID. We don't do this for comments yet. I think we'd want to give commenters control over how much information gets published about them. Combining this with OpenID opens some very interesting possibilities. People who opt in would be able to verifiably link their comments across OpenID-enabled sites, automatically track responses to their comments, or find other people who write similar comments. And a lot more things I haven't thought of.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Digg += OpenID!
I'm about to run out the door, but just had to blog (flog?) this: Digg will support OpenID! This is obviously huge, and particularly cool for us considering the features we're about to put into production for AOL Journals tonight.
(There are so many OpenID announcements that I feel the need for shorthand. Thus, "X += OpenID", plus ! for a particularly good move.)
(There are so many OpenID announcements that I feel the need for shorthand. Thus, "X += OpenID", plus ! for a particularly good move.)
Friday, February 16, 2007
AOL and 63 Million OpenIDs (from dev.aol.com)
I'm following up on the OpenID discussion over at dev.aol.com/blog:
Tags: OpenID, identity, social software, user centric identity
Yesterday, I blogged about AOL's work-in-progress on OpenID. It generated a lot of positive commentary. I realized after reading the reactions that I buried the lead: There are now 63 million AOL/AIM OpenIDs. Anyone can get one by signing up for a free AIM account. This is cool.(full article)
Tags: OpenID, identity, social software, user centric identity
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
AOL and OpenID: Where we are
It's not really a secret that AOL has been experimenting with OpenID. As I've said, I think that user-centric, interoperable identity is hugely important to enable the social experiences we're trying to provide. This is a work in progress, but things are coming along thanks to our authentication team's diligent effort. Here's where we are today:- Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/<sn>.
- This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
- We're working with OpenID relying parties to resolve compatibility issues.
- Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier. (No Yadis yet.)
- We don't yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we're actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
- We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
How many different identities can one person sanely manage?
...asks John Udell, in Critical mass and social network fatigue. I'd argue that the answer is about one and a half, in the long run. (The Shockwave Rider pushed it a lot further, but then he was founding cyberpunk. Also, he was fictional.)
When "identity" was just basically a system-local nickname used between you and a service, having multiple names for yourself was a minor inconvenience at worst, and sometimes mildly useful for privacy. Now that the services are more and more intermediaries between people, nicknames are a problem. Jon notes:
While OpenID isn't a total solution for these issues, it's a critical piece of infrastructure. As an example of the kinds of things it enables, take a look at Jyte.
When "identity" was just basically a system-local nickname used between you and a service, having multiple names for yourself was a minor inconvenience at worst, and sometimes mildly useful for privacy. Now that the services are more and more intermediaries between people, nicknames are a problem. Jon notes:
Years ago at BYTE Magazine my friend Ben Smith, who was a Unix greybeard even then (now he’s a Unix whitebeard), made a memorable comment that’s always stuck with me. We were in the midst of evaluating a batch of LAN email products. “One of these days,” Ben said in, I think, 1991, “everyone’s going to look up from their little islands of LAN email and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet.”Yep. Email is still the killer app of the Internet, and it wouldn't be if it were still stuck in LAN mail silos. Though spam is now so bad that I literally can't send email to a few people who can't manage their spam filters. That's a real issue and represents a real opportunity as well.
While OpenID isn't a total solution for these issues, it's a critical piece of infrastructure. As an example of the kinds of things it enables, take a look at Jyte.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Jangl, community, Internets
I'm hanging out at the Community Next conference at Stanford this afternoon. A couple of quick takes:
Jangl provides control over who can call you; put a widget on your web page and people can call you but not get your real phone number. And Jangl lets you control who actually gets through. Really a feature that the cell phone companies should provide but don't -- so if Jangl is successful, will the telecoms just copy it?
Also, from skinnyCorp:
Jangl provides control over who can call you; put a widget on your web page and people can call you but not get your real phone number. And Jangl lets you control who actually gets through. Really a feature that the cell phone companies should provide but don't -- so if Jangl is successful, will the telecoms just copy it?
Also, from skinnyCorp:
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
OpenID + CardSpace = Ubiquity
It's great to see Bill Gates announce that CardSpace will integrate with OpenID. Convergence, and momentum, is building.
It's also great to see people like Kevin blogging about OpenID and AOL (OpenID: Should AOL Care?) (Yes.)
It's also great to see people like Kevin blogging about OpenID and AOL (OpenID: Should AOL Care?) (Yes.)
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Essential Hardness of Programming
Software engineering's preoccupation is the arrangement of bits, as opposed to atoms.
One of the properties of bit arrangements is that their marginal
manufacturing cost is zero; once you have an arrangement of bits, you
can make as many exact copies of that arrangement as necessary,
whenever and wherever they're needed. By contrast, an arrangement of
atoms such as a bridge has a large marginal manufacturing cost, even if
you just want an exact copy. Further, there are few physical limits to
bits, while there are sharp physical limits to atoms. The only real
limit to bit arrangement is the human brain, and economics (how badly
people want bits arranged in particular ways).
These are the fundamental reasons why nearly every software engineering project is attempting new design, and is thus hard. This is because, in the world of software, design equals bit arrangements and copying a prior bit arrangement has zero cost. Finding an appropriate bit arrangement used to have substantial cost, but that cost is falling towards zero too. So for a given project, you can assume that competent software engineers have mostly found and copied the relevant patterns of bits where possible, and the remaining work is design.
Think about what the statement above means. This isn't like a civil engineer dealing with slightly differing terrain or traffic loads when adapting an existing design for a new bridge; it's more like a civil engineer being asked to build a bridge out of Jello on Pluto. And the next time, to build atop a moving lava flow on Mercury. In other words, with the easy, mechanical adaptations being taken care of by those ubiquitous bit patterns, the problems that are left for people to work out are the hard, surprising, novel ones. Usually with nonlinear And in software, design really is everything; once you've taken design to a detailed enough level that the implementation is mechanical... we let the machines do it.
Which is why I winced when I read Scott Rosenberg's interview in Salon. He gets it exactly right when he notes that there's always something new in every software project, otherwise there'd be no point in doing it. But he goes off the rails when he says, "...programmers are programmers because they like to code -- given a choice between learning someone else's code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter." Jonathan Rentzsch has already skewered this statement better than I could. It is of course true that there are some people who just aren't good at finding prior solutions, or at understanding them once found, and they may contribute to unnecessary re-creation of software, increasing both cost and risk to larger projects. But they're not the norm, and aren't a major cause of the "always something new" phenomenon. The essence of software development is new design.
This is also why attempts to map manufacturing based activities to software development are at best rough approximations and at worst dangerous distractions. Software development is a knowledge acquisition activity, not a manufacturing activity.
These are the fundamental reasons why nearly every software engineering project is attempting new design, and is thus hard. This is because, in the world of software, design equals bit arrangements and copying a prior bit arrangement has zero cost. Finding an appropriate bit arrangement used to have substantial cost, but that cost is falling towards zero too. So for a given project, you can assume that competent software engineers have mostly found and copied the relevant patterns of bits where possible, and the remaining work is design.
Think about what the statement above means. This isn't like a civil engineer dealing with slightly differing terrain or traffic loads when adapting an existing design for a new bridge; it's more like a civil engineer being asked to build a bridge out of Jello on Pluto. And the next time, to build atop a moving lava flow on Mercury. In other words, with the easy, mechanical adaptations being taken care of by those ubiquitous bit patterns, the problems that are left for people to work out are the hard, surprising, novel ones. Usually with nonlinear And in software, design really is everything; once you've taken design to a detailed enough level that the implementation is mechanical... we let the machines do it.
Which is why I winced when I read Scott Rosenberg's interview in Salon. He gets it exactly right when he notes that there's always something new in every software project, otherwise there'd be no point in doing it. But he goes off the rails when he says, "...programmers are programmers because they like to code -- given a choice between learning someone else's code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter." Jonathan Rentzsch has already skewered this statement better than I could. It is of course true that there are some people who just aren't good at finding prior solutions, or at understanding them once found, and they may contribute to unnecessary re-creation of software, increasing both cost and risk to larger projects. But they're not the norm, and aren't a major cause of the "always something new" phenomenon. The essence of software development is new design.
This is also why attempts to map manufacturing based activities to software development are at best rough approximations and at worst dangerous distractions. Software development is a knowledge acquisition activity, not a manufacturing activity.
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