Friday, November 30, 2007

Internet Identity Workshop 2007b

IIW LogoI'll be at IIW next week, talking about Blogger, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and anything else that seems interesting.  I'm anticipating a great event.

OpenID Commenting for Blogger!

We've just enabled OpenID signed comments for Blogger in Draft. There are a few rough edges still (which is why you have to enable it for your blog by going to draft.blogger.com), so we're looking for feedback. We're also working on enabling Blogger as an OpenID Provider, meaning that you can use your blog URL to identify yourself on other services.

What's particularly fun about this is that it's been a very collaborative project, bringing together Blogger engineers, 20% time from a couple of non-Blogger engineers, and last but not least some of the fine open source libraries provided by the OpenID community. Thanks all!

Tags:

Friday, November 9, 2007

Essential Atom and AtomPub in 30 seconds

Atom is this: You have a bunch of things, or sometimes just one thing.  They always have unique ids, they have timestamps, and tell you who created/is responsible for them.  Oh yeah, if you can, please provide a short snippet of text describing each thing.

AtomPub is how to discover, create, delete, and edit those things.

Everything else is optional and/or extensions.

Tags: ,

Friday, November 2, 2007

OpenSocial Ecosystem

has been... extensively covered in just about all media over the past few days.  The official site is up, and the video from the Campfire 1 announcement as well.

Obviously this is just a first step.  We're all trying to build a self-sustaining ecosystem, and right now we're bootstrapping.  It's a bit like terraforming:  We just launched the equivalent of space ships carrying algae :).

A key next step is making it easy to create social app containers.  It's not hard to build a web page that can contain Gadgets, though it could be easier.  Adding the social APIs, the personal data stores, social identity, and authentication and authorization makes things a lot more complex.  This is the part I'm working on, along with a lot of other people.  It's a problem space I've been working in for a while on the side.  Now it's time to achieve 'rough consensus and running code.'


Thursday, October 25, 2007

Blogger #1 "Social Networking" Site Worldwide

The folks over at Windows Live Spaces just crunched some ComScore worldwide numbers.  Their headline was "Windows Live Spaces at a Crossroads", but I think my headline fits their graphs better.

According to them, Blogger did 140,000,000 worldwide unique visitors in September, and has been on a tear since June.  Nice!  And to all those Blogger users, thank you!

Of course, whether Blogger is a "Social Networking" site depends on your definitions; Dare wants to disqualify the front runner.  Me? I think 140 million people can speak for themselves.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Fireblog

The San Diego Union-Tribune has been posting wildfire-related updates in real time to a site, http://fireblog.signonsandiego.com/, but their servers melted under the load, so they moved over to Blogger yesterday, and have been up and running and helping people out since last night. It was great to be able to tell them that load isn't a problem for us :).

Monday, October 22, 2007

A Four Year Mission... to Boldly Go Where No Protocol has Gone Before

Today's message from the IETF:

The Atom Publishing Format and Protocol WG (atompub) in the Application Area has concluded.

...

The AtomPub WG was chartered to work on two items: the syndication format in RFC4287, and the publishing protocol in RFC5023. Implementations of these specs have been shown to work together and interoperate well to support publishing and syndication of text content and media resources.

Since both documents are now Proposed Standards, the WG has completed its charter and therefore closes as a WG. A mailing list will remain open for further discussion.

Congratulations and thanks to the chairs Tim Bray and Paul Hoffman, to the editors of the two WG RFCs (Mark Nottingham, Robert Sayre, Bill de Hora and Joe Gregorio), and to the many contributors and  implementors.