Signing up Users

I'm planning to write a series of posts under "Tech Tip". The purpose of these posts are to share ideas/tips around how companies can leverage technology approaches in their solutions to gain competitive advantage. I also intend to provide technology implementation details as applicable.

One of the major goals for a startup is to motivate users to sign up for their service and eventually to sustain the user base. There are a bunch of startups coming up everyday and from an user its quite overwhelming for them to remember credentials for all of them. As Joshua Porter puts it in his Usage Lifecycle, the challenge here is to Sign-up an unaware/interested user. Even early adopters who might be interested in trying your service may not be motivated. But we can solve this problem by leveraging authentication technology possibilities.

It is very likely that your interested user will have one of Hotmail/Yahoo/Facebook/Google/OpenID account.

By providing your users to authenticate using these services will definitely increase the probability of an enthusiastic user to sign up. These services have libraries and documentation in their respective developer web site.

Clickpass

Clickpass is a startup providing single sign-on service that requires no effort from the end-user but provides the convenience for your site to authenticate using Google, Facebook, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. They provide extensive developer documentation and can be found here. TechCrunch also has coverage about this service. However there are also views like these that you need to be aware of before making your decision.

OAuth

OAuth is an open initiative for an open protocol to allow secure third-party website authentication . Its starting to gain traction and worth keeping an eye on their blog.

Resources

Live ID Web Authentication System
Yahoo BBauth
Google Account Authentication API

AB Meta: Whats is this thing? but what is that?

AdaptiveBlue announced AB Meta specification in an effort for web pages to expose data about "things" in a standardized way. In this post I will briefly outline in simple terms what this means and propose some conceptual extensions that could provide possibilities for more use-cases.

The purpose of AB Meta specification is to enable web pages (that talk about "thing") to expose their attributes in a standardized way so that programs can understand. For example consider this page from amazon.com: Click Here. It is the landing page for the book titled "Programming Collective Intelligence". Taking a closer look at the source of the page today the following META tags can be found:

<meta name="description" content="Amazon.com: Programming Collective Intelligence:
Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications: Toby Segaran : Books" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Toby Segaran ,Programming Collective Intelligence:
Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications,O'Reilly Media, Inc.,
0596529325,Computer Programming,Machine Learning,Computers,Computers -
General Information,Computers - Languages / Programming,Computer Books:
Languages,Artificial Intelligence - General,Programming - General,Computers / Artificial Intelligence,
Computers / Languages / Programming,Computers / Programming / General,Computers/Artificial Intelligence -
General,Data processing,Economic aspects,Information technology,Knowledge management,
Social aspects,Programming - Algorithms,Programming Languages - Python,Internet programming,Web site development" />

As you can see the META tag provides metadata about the book in a unstructured way, so for instance bn.com might provide in a different format (or not at all). This is the problem that AB Meta is solves.

AB Meta proposes to leverage META tag and use a standardized format to describe a "thing". A "thing" could be a book, music, cycle, car, movie, etc. This post from their blog provides a good introduction with examples. In a AB Meta enabled amazon.com the meta tags could look like this:

meta name="'object.type'" content="'book'"
meta name="'book.name'" content="Programming Collective Intelligence"
meta name="'book.author'" content="Toby Segaran"
meta name="'book.isbn'" content="0596529325"

etc..

Extensions

Here are few extensions (new attributes) which I believe would worth considering:

OBJECT_TYPE.unique_attr:

The purpose of this attribute is to specify which of the listed attributes universally identify this object uniquely. For books it could be book.isbn and so

book.unique_attr='book.isbn'

Given the growing trend for open data I believe this extension will open up lot of new possibilities.

OBJECT_TYPE.context_attr:

Pages could use this attribute to optionally specify under which context they are talking about the object. For example a user search based on author_name could return a list of books in this case the context is author.

book.context_attr='book.author'

OBJECT_TYPE.ATTRIBUTE_uri:

This is an optional tag that pages can use to publish an URI that talks more about the value of a given attribute. For example for the author of a book it could refer to his wiki page, home page, etc. :

book.author_uri='http://kiwitobes.com/'

Though this might not be very frequently used it is useful tool to present contextual data.

So this answers, what is that?

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the initiative will definitely provide a standardized way for the publishers to expose meaningful contextual data. However the ultimate success of the initiative lies in the adoption by the community. Here the community primarily being online product vendors and services.
I certainly as always welcome any thoughts/comments on the attributes on their implementation.

Scribd - the documents

Scribd - the documents avatar of YouTube is a YCombinator startup. I'm impressed by the navigational site design and of course the document renderer. This startup reminds me of one of the open source project called e-sharepoint which was built with the same vision but never saw completion. I had contributed for e-sharepoint as a developer almost two years back.

I built a Google Co-op Search for searching e-books on Scribd and here is the link for it:

http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=007158556442307674881%3Acirvbqaziqu

Some of the features that I would love to see in Scribd includes:

• Quote on a selected text and link to it from comments (dynamic highlighting)
• Facilitate more user discussions by improving comments feature
• Allow users to recommend similar/related documents
• Allow Pin-n-Publish of reading list in RSS

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