OpenID Adoption

As we know OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric identity. The goal is to have the user remember one user name and password and login to any site which supports the protocol. It is light-weight and supports SSO.

In the past few days there has been a lot of traction to OpenID adoption with the announcement for its support from the giants AOL, Microsoft and Digg. So if you have an AOL account then your open id is http://openid.aol.com/username and you can login to any website that supports OpenID. With the growing number of startups the adoption rate for OpenID is poised to grow rapidly.

User Resources

To start using OpenID you will need to obtain one. If you already have an AOL account you could use that if you like. Or you can obtain one from http://www.myopenid.com/. For a quick overview of OpenID here is a video.

Developer Resources

From a developer perspective for you to support OpenID either as client or server there are several resources available as noted below:

OpenID Enabled - OpenID community
OpenID Client/Server Libraries - C#, Java, Perl, C++, PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion
BotBouncer - A CAPTCHA service for OpenID

I was looking at OpenID4Java API - Consumer side and is pretty straight forward.

OpenID and CardSpace

Here is a post explaining how these two complementary technologies can work together. Its interesting.

tags: openid, technology, aol, microsoft, cardspace

Google server down

Google Server is currently down! I have never encountered this one before so wanted to blog!

Yahoo! Pipes -Dynamic Translation for Feeds!

This week's major release and screaming is all about Yahoo! Pipes. Of course I'm excited about it too. Yahoo! Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator/manipulator.

I just built my first Pipe - a translation pipe for German version of Reddit using the Babel Fish module. One could clone this and use this for any feed translation from any language. Click here to access the Pipe!

I expected this kind of service for a while and there could be a new/similar service to create Widgets/Gadgets in a similar fashion. Apple Dashboard, Google Gadget IDE, Visual Studio Gadget API provide this on a proprietary platform but more generic ones will emerge.

Dig-the-digg: Friend Finder!

Digg is one of the busiest social bookmarking site where people are sharing their interests by registering their vote on the links. To me this seems to be an interesting way to meet new people. Few days back I was inspired by the idea of how the intersection of similar diggs of a person with another person could be a way to meet new friends. Let say I digg on a set of links and if there is another user who diggs on the same links that I digg on then he/she could be my potential friend, its not really necessary the other users diggs on all the links that I digg but a reasonable digg rate could be considered.

I wrote a little crawler to crawl on my diggs and found some interesting results. One could try this manually too and here is how:

1. Goto one of your Diggs and click on "Who Dugg or Blogged this?"
2. Click on each user to see their Diggs and find a user whose diggs you like
3. Subscribe to his/her Digg Feed (RSS)
4. Now, even if you're not an actively digging you will not miss out on interesting links