Tag: openid

Goodbye MyOpenID?

OpenID Logo

I received this email recently…

I wanted to reach out personally to let you know that we have made the decision to end of life the myOpenID service. myOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014.

In 2006 Janrain created myOpenID to fulfill our vision to make registration and login easier on the web for people. Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards. And now, billions of people who have created accounts with these services can use their identities to easily register and login to sites across the web in the way myOpenID was intended.

By 2009 it had become obvious that the vast majority of consumers would prefer to utilize an existing identity from a recognized provider rather than create their own myOpenID account. As a result, our business focus changed to address this desire, and we introduced social login technology. While the technology is slightly different from where we were in 2006, I’m confident that we are still delivering on our initial promise – that people should take control of their online identity and are empowered to carry those identities with them as they navigate the web.

For those of you who still actively use myOpenID, I can understand your disappointment to hear this news and apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. To reduce this inconvenience, we are delaying the end of life of the service until February 1, 2014 to give you time to begin using other identities on those sites where you use myOpenID today.

Speaking on behalf of Janrain, I truly appreciate your past support of myOpenID.

Sincerely,
Larry

No more myOpenID, I guess it was on the cards and to be fair its surprising its stayed open this long? Shame openid has been pretty much co-opted by the massive internet corps. The same ones which seem to do little to protect our data.

Data portability in dating, we can only hope

From OnlineDatingPost

Speaking of sharing, Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers. Data portability isn’t something discussed in the dating industry very often in public. Dating sites sell profiles up and down the river every day, but that’s a big shhhh! topic. Everywhere else, data portability is the topic of the moment, and will be for many quarters to come.

While I’m glad the message is getting through, without some standards like APML your not going to see any portability in the dating field. Even OKCupid.com who is one of the enlighten sites doesn’t have support for Openid, Oauth or anything like that. Supporting profile and data sharing or portability is going to be a major stumbling block for any dating site, simply because the revenue models rely upon data being held, locked down and processed by the company. This doesn’t fit with data portability right now.

Once they work out they can track people around the web using cookies and other techniques (which I assume will make there searches stronger and there for make for better matches) I’m sure you will start to see they at least providing openid if not oauth between partner sites.

Mashup* Identity 2.0

So first up I'm not that impressed with being invited to an event, turning up and not finding my name on the list. Then a slap in the face when I get hit with a bill for 35 pounds. Having no cash, means I'm forced to hand over my business card so they can invoice me. Not impressed!

Down into the BT showcase area and the magic of the not long gone BarCampLondon2. Who do I see? Nat Bat, my co-hoster from BarCampLondon2. Thank god because all I can see otherwise is lots of gray suits.

Tony Fish introduces the evening by ending with the words “how do we make money from this?” Enough said really

The first speaker gives a brief overview of the all the issues to do with identity. But never once talks about people owning their own identity. Richard Baker from BT now, finally he mentions user-centric and multiple identities/personas. He also mentions that fact we need to think about the other mediums in regards to identity. His example of call centres is good. Richard finalise his talk by pointing at the balance between risk, convince, costs. Nice sensible talk. Now Simon Wilison, so the wireless fucks up and simon can't show how it works – nightmare! So on with the show. After explaining the benefits of open ID in the Single sign on, simon talks about identity projection. Projecting your id from one system to another. Thankfully Simon mentions that OpenID isn't the silver bullet, there are caveats like trust. Simon gives a cut down talk from the future of webapps. Fast paced and maybe lost a few people but it was really good. At the end, Simon finally got to demo openID.

Now the Panel. Eger from the government slates openID because its too difficult for most users in the UK. Missing the point of Open ID, which is, its open and decentralized. Most of the questions about Open ID were easy pickings for Simon who rubbed his hands with glee when getting those OpenID 101 questions. There were some good questions banded around at the end but by then the hour long debate had gone on too long for most of us.

So generally Mashup reminds me of the events I use to go to when I first moved to London. There good if your into business but generally only scratch the surface and usually the people want to know how to make money out of the thing under the surface. I'm surprised no one just came out and said where do I make money out of Open ID, maybe because Simons slide on why the enterprise should be using OpenID was too clear?

The event was well run but I felt the most important person there was Simon and besides the internet screw up, he could have had more challenging questions at a geekdinner or something. I have to question the cost of the event too. Its quite a lot for 3x 10min talks and then a hour panel session. Yes there was buffet food and drinks for free but thats 35x 100+ people. Maybe I'm dead wrong but personally I didn't get much out of the evening except a couple of peoples contract details.

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BarCampLondon2 is over…

Ending BarCampLondon2

BarCampLondon2 could not have gone much better. It was a great experience and dare It, better that the first one. Thanks to everyone who turned up and made it an unforgettable event. I've had a total of 3 hours sleep over the weekend, so my brain is crying out for bed. But who could know Werewolf could be so intense….

Werewolf

lots more to come… but in the meantime, I'm uploading video to blip.tv, pictures to flickr and my slides to slideshare. All using the BarCampLondon2 tag.

So my account of BarCampLondon2 should be pretty consistent with most others. It was a bloody good event. The venue supplied by BT was nothing short of amazing. We had the showcase arena which includes autoriumum fit for CEOs including 180+ investers. Thseat wewcomfortablele enough for me to actually sleep hours unlikeke the Yahoo offices last year, we only had a couple of so called rooms. Instead we spaces with either a 60 inch plasma screen or projectors with over 100 inch screens. Most of them seateabout 4040people, so with 3 spaces upstairs, one in the middle and 3 downstairs. There was more that enough room. But at the same time, it never felt like there was no one around. Talking of which 70+ people stayed over night, how do I know? Because I went around about 5am and counted. This is over double what we had last time and according to Chris Messina better that the last San Francisco BarCamp. Quite a few people didn't go to sleep over night, they opted to stay uthrough thehenight. In total we had about 170 people, but i did notice some new people during the day, so I would say we weren't that far off 200. I also think the people who really wanted to present did get a chance, also this time around no one had more that one session.

This time around we also had wireless connectivity, this time via BT Openzone passes. We (the organizers) were honestly worried about 24 hour passes. BT offered a lot of Openzone passes but each one cost its full price of 10 pounds. So obviously BT wanted to keep the costs down. Hence we didn't throw them out the crowd. We worried there wouldn't be enough for everyone during the whole of BarCamp. So come Sunday morning we would have a 100 people asking for new passes at the same time. We tried to setup ut itwasn't to be. In the end it all worked out and out worst fears didn't happen.

Talking about Organizers, Nat and Jason were a pleasure to work with. Some people might remember me asking for a co-organizer to work with a while ago. A lot of people were interested but in the end I choose Jason because he was super excited to be involved and lived pretty close. Nat although living in Oxford was also very excited and offered to do what she could remotely like print out signs, etc. Both of them were enthuastic and were willing to spend a lot of time on BarCampLondon2. I had maother offersersbut some were less excited and some had already done a BarCamp in another country. I really wanted to give new people a chance to get a feel for BarCamp and who knows might happen in the future. So big thanks to Nat and Jason once again, couldn't have done it without you guys.

So in more details behind the decisions of BarCampLondon2.

Eventwax, was recommended to me by Nat. I setup an account (wishes it had OpenID support) and liked what I saw. So I used it and gave the account details to Nat and Jason too. Our first problem came with the firsign upnup period of 1.5hrs. I allocated 100 tickets and they all went in 1.5 hours. Now that was fucking amazing but the message which you got when you then tried to sign up wasn't very useful. So much so, that our friends who don't speEnglishish as there first language didn't quite get the odd messageabout tickets and went ahead and booked their airplane/train tickets. So in that case I would send out a invite or clue them into went the next wave of tickets would be. Some could say thats unfair but its tricky if that person has already bought there tickets. I had a lot of complaints about the words tickets aattendeesees. I would love for the Eventwax guys to build in the ability to change the wording through out the site on a event by event bases. Tabilityity to also say this event is free and costs nothingwould be useful. I didn't try out the promo code stuff but that certainly looks useful for guest tickets in the future, would certainly beat sending out invites. The different levels of tickets was damm useful, because I could do the wave thing with tickets. So after the first 100, I started putting out tickets on the wiki and a few email lists. The same is true of the 3rd wave. Eventwax allows you decide in advance when tickets go live and stop. Date is great but time would also be very useful, as midnight isn'tvery useful for most people. Cancellation are a pain to deal with eventwax (although thank you to everyone who did email us), it would be great to have an aggregator ticket which looks how many spaces are actually left and offers them up as a ticket. On the last wave of tickets I had to keep cacluating the difference and changing the tickets for the last wave. That was a pain. Looking back I shouldn't have left the last wave of tickets till 2 days before the event but I really wanted to reuse all tcanceledledtickets. In the end we ended up with about 20% not used.

One last thing about the ticket thing, I wish I'd never mentioned IDs and checking. That caused a shit storm which I thought might actually shadow the event. My reasoning behind it was because yes I did hear about people selling tickets and getting multiple tickets under different names. There might have been some truth to it all but in the end we still had the 20% drop off.

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