OpenCoffee: Too Little OpenID
Thursday was another day at OpenCoffee and of course I was there to spot the latest trends. I noticed that I started to recognize more and more faces so I decided to take it easy that day. As a result I spent most of the time talking with people who had nice ideas but no product, and others who had nice products but shitty ideas. I won’t name these people as they weren’t that interesting (however, it might fun to do a worst-of-opencoffee?).
In the end I had a good talk with the ever present David Terrar who pointed me to some guys from Cork (Ireland) who had some nice products and ideas. The guys had come to OpenCoffee London because as organizers of the OpenCoffee in Cork they wanted taste some of the London vibe. Besides being very nice guys they also proved to be very much into the subjects of web-apps, social software, and startups.
Walter Higgins of Sxoop Technologies developed an online photo-editor with the name Pixenate. In contrary to tools like Picnik this tool can actually be licensed/sold to be run on other servers and they offer a very nice API to integrate their product with existing solutions. I’m actually not that much a fan of online editors as I love Photoshop and LightRoom, but I think that integration of tools like these with online web-apps like Flickr would ease the workflow of many consumers.
The workflow that consumers go through now is “transfer from camera to pc - edit - upload” and I think that with the integration of Pixenate this could be turned into “transfer from camera to web - edit - publish” .
I recently heard some rumors of a photoframe with direct upload capabilities for Flickr which would cover the first step in the workflow described above.
Afterwards I had a lunch with Walter and some other Irish guys including Conor O’Neill. Conor runs a very interesting site called LouderVoice. The concept behind LouderVoice is to enable users to make reviews (the main thing we do here) made on their own site/blog/myspace/whatever searchable and rate-able. I really like the concept as they leave the content made by the users at their own sites instead of pushing all these reviews into one pool like Amazon does with books and Kelkoo (rubbish site) does with products. Although it might not be the most “Ajax equipped and Web2.0 looking”-website on reviews I do think that the technique behind it (a special Microformat called hReview) really makes them a very interesting player. I’m thinking of putting the hReview format into some of the past Four Starters reviews soon.
In the end I think it was another successful OpenCoffee, but I do notice more and more that when you ask a startup (like LouderVoice) if they support OpenID that their response tends to be: “We are looking into that”. Isn’t it an easy way for new web-apps to get attention from the highly tech-oriented population by providing OpenID from the start? Most of these startups actually agree with me that OpenID is a very good thing, but still they don’t dare to provide it from the start. I think it is time to start pushing OpenID as the primary login system to new startups.
http://claimid.com/conoro http://claimid.com/conoro
May 13th, 2007Great to talk to you on Thursday Cristiano.
I take your point regarding OpenID. I’ve been a fan of it and blogged about it several times in the past 12 months. We’ve had it in our spec since last summer but decided to delay implementing it until after our launch. The reasons are mainly to do with availability of development funds and a desire to launch.
It will be part of our next major upgrade along with a bunch of other features we didn’t have time to finish for the launch. Keep an eye on our blog.
walter http://pixenate.com
May 14th, 2007Hi Cristiano,
It was great to meet up. We definitely must fly over more often.
Walter
alper http://www.alper.nl
May 14th, 2007The thing with OpenID is that it is in its infancy in both Rails and Django and the situation is probably wildly varied in the PHP world.
I think Rails OpenID support started with the launch of Highrise. How far along is that?
Simon Willison just released a package to turn your Django site into an OpenID consumer. Simon plans to turn it into a best practices showcase for OpenID support so that promises to be excellent.
Development on this should be quite quick as Django/Python is quite easy to program into. When it is complete this should be integrated in Django. When supporting OpenID is as easy as flicking a switch in the settings, then you will see the adoption you are looking for.
One obvious factor why you should support OpenID is that early adopters are becoming a bit jaded and account weary with every new site that pops up. Allowing them to register using their already existant OpenID will definitely lower their mental barrier to entry.