Towards a shared OpenID experience

Yesterday’s OpenID User Experience Summit (hosted by Facebook) has got together a lot of people interested in building a better user experience for OpenID.

If the process succeeds we’ll be able to have a

world where it won’t matter if you’re on Facebook, MySpace or Microsoft Live – where Yahoo’s content is read by Friendfeed, and your MySpace music preferences are matched with friends in Facebook so that you all can coordinate events on Eventful that you heard about on someone’s TypePad blog and was Twittered about on Seesmic and later indexed and searched by Google.

I’ve been able to follow just a bit of the initial presentations on the UStream but Plaxo’s John McCrea has a detailed live blogging post, moreover all the presentations are online at slideshare (plus here are the UStream recorded sessions)

The first thing I find interesting are the results of the Plaxo/Google hybrid OpenID/OAuth experiment. The stunning 92% rate of click through success shows that the open protocols can be made more effective by implementing a better user experience. Moreover it shows that the users, if given a good enough experience, will not fear to follow a path that’s different from the antipattern they have been (mis)educated to use.

The Plaxo/Google process is awesome if you think about the amount of interaction that is taking place within those two clicks

It’s a win-win as this shows how something may be made at the same time

On the downside of this approach is that it will not be easy to scale this beyond the single provider. I hope it doesn’t ends up in a proliferation of single-provider buttons (for somthing that may be implemented with the same undelying technology).

This is a treat without cooperation among the interested parties but looking at the meeting and how the big-cos and many of the smaller players are talking to each other there is hope that it will happen for real.

Cobol Cloud

Cloudification of IT services will be a growing trend in the coming months, one (big) step forward in this process is the announce today that Microfocus has released a virtualized mainframe environment which will let enterprises run CICS and IMS code in the cloud

The real breakthrough is that this will enable a whole sector within our industry to transition to a modern architecture. There are a lot of ISVs which have invested heavily and have a great knowhow in mainframe technologies and those were facing tough times with clients lending towards web services and cloud systems to renew their IT (this is specially true for many small italian software houses working on ERP systems).

With this offering those ISVs will be able to transition current clients to cloud systems and perhaps they will be able to re-engineer and modernize their software one piece at a time as hopefully the Microfocus service will enable new ways to integrate mainframe software and internet services.

Inbox 33k

I always looked at “Inbox Zero” approach with a mixed feeling: I find it extremely useful to think about action-based email handling but was never sold on the importance of getting your inbox to zero.

Or perhaps I’ve never been able to apply that strategy completely. With the years, and more so after starting to use gmail in late 2004, I’ve been using my inbox as a flow-based interface to the river of conversations coming to me.

My inbox today

I regularly check for new emails, looking at just the first page of the inbox (sometimes just the first 10 emails), if something needs my immediate attention I read it and act on it (replying or applying the TODO label). Colored labels applyed by  filters help me focus my attention on any serious item (e.g. the exceptions raised from my rails apps are marked in dark red ).

I have also the habit of subscribing to many mailing lists (at least one for each of the tools I use regularly), and usually make sure those emails are properly labeled and go also on the inbox (unless the ML is really heavy or if it’s something I don’t care currently).

For the rest I just had to stop worrying about losing some important message and the river-of-emails kind of managed itself, if there’s some important topic I miss (to act upon) it will just re-pop itself on the top: the people will resend the email, the mailing list thread will receive more messages, … (If it doesn’t re-gain the top spot it was probably not that important).

I specially like default format for the message list which got rid of the three pane layout and automatically organized email threads by reverse chronological order while showing not only the subject but also the first few words of the body (moreover it doesn’t sweat if you throw 10′s of thousands of emails). This is just one example of the reasons making gmail just about perfect for doing email my way (or perhaps it’s just a case of a tool that shapes the habit of its user :-) )

P.S. This is something that I wanted to put down for a while, but just got around after reading this article, which worked as a ping popping up on top of my river-of-news reader :)

Viewing Bit.ly metadata on a post

I just added a way to autmatically add url shortening to each post. It uses the bit.ly service and their nice widget which opens a small box into the page with the shortened url ready to be posted on twitter or other services, and shows a nice set of metadata for the post itself. Here is how it looks like:

Bit.ly metadata for a post

To add it I modified the template adding this:

at the bottom of each post single-page template (single.php) and at the bottom of each post in the main index template (index.php)