lindner

Just got an email that Plaxo is discontinuing bare OpenId support and only allowing Google/Yahoo/Hotmail/Facebook for login. Despite OpenId's shortcomings it's sad to see things regress.

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Hello from Plaxo,

In an effort to improve our login experience for users, Plaxo.com is simplifying and standardizing our sign in options. As such, Plaxo will discontinue support of generic OpenID logins as of 08/23/2011. Instead we're offering login via Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, or Facebook oAuth -- or you can, of course, create a Plaxo specific account.

How will this affect me?

If you use a Google, Yahoo, Hotmail or Facebook openid to login, just click the appropriate button when signing in. Plaxo will ask for permission to use your account credentials; click accept/grant and then go on using Plaxo as you normally would.

If you use any other openid to login, please visit our Forgot Password and follow the instructions for Reset Password, which will create you a Plaxo specific password.

#paullindner #paullindner

 At hi5 we've been busy busy busy getting OpenSocial up and running.  We released our developer sandbox, and are rapidly implementing features.  So check out the following URLs

• hi5 OpenSocial developer announcement
  
• http://sandbox.hi5.com/
• hi5 Platform Development Group

Also, here's a copy of my response to Tim O'Reilly's blog post:

OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid

Hi folks,

Good comments all around. However I'd like to posit that data access is _not_ the problem. We've had universal standards for years now with little uptake. Tribe.net, Typepad, LiveJournal and others have supported FOAF for many, many years, which encompasses the OpenSocial Person and Friends APIs. Not much has come of that -- there isn't a large enough base there to get people interested.

Now you have a broad industry consensus on a single way to provide all of the above plus activity stream data. You have a rich client platform that allows you to crack open that data and use it in interesting ways, and finally you have a common standard for social networks to interact with each other based on the REST api.

So Patrick's statement at the Web 2.0 Expo is correct, a app running inside a container only allows you to see what that container shows you. However that does not mean that a container could not contain friend references to external social networks via it's own federation mechanism. Movable Type 4.0 has shown that you can support any OpenID login in a single system, there's no reason to believe that social networks could not leverage OAuth to do the same.

And here's a final point to consider -- you have Myspace opening up to developers. That's huge. That alone is going to draw more developer attention to this problem than much of the oh-so academic discussions of the past few years.

I suggest people that _want_ OpenSocial to solve all the social graph ills get involved on the API mailing list and make sure that those elements are addressed as OpenSocial evolves.

There's a tremendous amount of momentum. Let's not waste this chance.

#hi5 #opensocial

I'm happy to announce that Hi5 has Widget support.  Yes, I know that this is soooo last year. However there's a twist that makes it better.

We worked closely with Rock You and Slide to integrate tightly with our site, using open standards wherever possible.  For example, for slideshows we created Atom Feeds for each photo album, and a feed-of-albums feed for the list of all albums.  And when it came time to share profile information for horoscopes (birthday) and languages spoken we used FOAF.  Thus we get partners to adopt open standards, plus the work we did for them is usable by everyone. 

The only tricky part was authentication and authorization.  Right now it's using our own AuthToken implementation, but it could probably be done in a better way.  I looked into OpenID as a mechanism, but's way too end-user centric for this type of thing.

Coming soon we should have full Atom endpoints (both in/out with WSSE auth), OpenID provider, and a few other standards based things like XMPP vCard support.  All of this is being done with an Web Services Aspect Oriented toolkit called Enunciate, which has made writing these services a very enjoyable experience.

#atom #foaf #hi5 #openid #widgets