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.

I don’t want to hold your identity

So… news of the day (yesterday actually) is that Facebook is getting on board in the OpenID foundation (this is following the annoucement a while back about Paypal doing the same).
Commenters are beginning to recognize that OpenID is actually gaining more momentum than most would have tought and the adoption that many big online services are showing is helping to build a larger mindshare also among the less geeky users.

One critique that I hear a lot is that the way the bigger players are approaching OpenID, basically turning every one of their accounts into an OpenID for their users is not really helping the open web since it’s like every site giving out an email address everybody can send to but just accepting email from their own email addresses. This is true, but here lies also a great opportunity for the smaller players. If you are a startup you should be happy, as what’s happening may mean that you can have a lot more potential users with an easier path to try out your service (got a google account? no need to signup!).
Ideally one’s identity online should not be tied to a specific service, but more likely each user will have one main service which represents his own main “self” online. That will be the main service they use online, the one they are spending more time on. It may be a Google account or a Facebook one or a Myspace identity or their wordpress.com hosted blog, but we can be almost sure that it will not be your shiny new little service.

It’s a great thing that now most of these “main” identities have become portable (thanks to OpenID and Facebook Connect) that is usable elsewhere, just being able to tap into the great number of people that will already have one of the hub-provided identities

You should start right now to plan and execute to adopt OpenID as a consumer, adding also Facebook Connect in the mix as long as they are separate (hopefully they’ll be interoperable in the future).

I don’t want provide a new identity just to be able to tell who you are, thus I, for sure, will try to do this with the services I’m working on.

P.S. I specially like this quote from Chris Messina I read on the ReadWriteWeb:

user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors

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 :)