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Posts Tagged ‘openid’

During the video interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina I recorded earlier this year at a German conference about the state of OpenID, he expressed his wish that the Obama administration would soon start to embrace the decentralized, single sign-on method as a way for citizens to engage with the U.S. government online. Four months later, it looks like his dreams are becoming reality.

Later this morning at the Gov 2.0 Summit, Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra will talk about data.gov and other governmental transparency initiatives, and will also be making an announcement regarding the launch of a open identity initiative featuring the use of both OpenID and InfoCards in a special pilot program.

Make no mistake about it: this has the potential to change the way citizens participate in and communicate with the U.S. government.

The OpenID Foundation has recently published a letter from executive director Don Thibeau as well as a fairly detailed white paper (PDF) on the subject of open frameworks for open governments that you might want to read for background. While the ‘Participating Providers in the U.S. Government Pilot Program’ section on the OpenID Foundation’s website hasn’t gone live yet, the Information Card Foundation provides more details about the pilot program on its blog.

Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Citi, Equifax, Acxiom, Privo and Wave Systems will be the ten organizations to act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies in the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government.

The programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are said to be getting certification under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.

As an example, we have learned that VeriSign – a founding member of the OpenID Foundation – will serve as an identity provider for a pilot program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services and regarded as one of the world’s foremost medical research centers as well as the Federal focal point for health research. Thanks to this implementation, citizens will be able to more easily provide input on public policy and access their own tax and Social Security records with OpenID:

In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.”

Likely, we’ll learn more from Vivek Kundra’s scheduled speech at the Gov 2.0 Summit later today, but one thing is crystal clear: this is a big win for both the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation.

Who would have predicted say, 5 years ago, that you would some day be able to use commercial identities on government websites?

P.S.: also read Tim O’Reilly’s guest post on Gov 2.0 as a platform.

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When in the course of human events people lose their jobs and their ways to pay for bags of random stuff and close-out smoke detectors, it behooves all good men to approach shopping site Woot.com with trepidation and distrust. The result? A steady decline in traffic from the post-holiday period of 2009 until about May 2009. Now, however, that is changing. If I can draw your attention to this graph, you’ll notice that yes, traffic is going up. Everything is going to be OK.

The general trend at Woot has been heading down since 2008 and seems to be rolling back up this summer. Obviously none of this stuff is set in stone and absolutely accurate but it’s fairly clear that Woot is turning around. But what does this mean?


Woot is obviously cyclical and is a direct pointer to the pocket change of a certain technical class who may be interested in lasers and walkie-talkies from China that didn’t sell. That said, one would assume said walkie-talkies would be more desirable when you’re in a job than when you’re out of one and/or when you have a little disposable income.

So to recap: Woot traffic took a dive in January and is slowly creeping up. This means it is more popular. As it is a shopping site I suspect the folks visiting aren’t like street urchins in some Victorian novel, their noses pressed up against the glass of a sweet shop dreaming of toffees and crumbles. They are actually shopping.

In short, while I wouldn’t stake my dissertation on this trend, Woot’s ability to predict a financial rebound should not be dismissed and that trend is going up. Also they’re selling a Bluetooth headset with case right now for $30 clams. Not a bad price.

[Thanks, Thomas!]

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There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

But something everyone on the web knows is their email address. And they’re conditioned by services like Google and Facebook to use it as their identifier. The problem with it has been that it’s just a string of text, nothing more. You cannot attach information to it to let others know a bit more about you — something vital for true identification. Then idea behind WebFinger is that you should be able to attach any information you choose to your email address.

The excitement today is that a group of Googlers have apparently finally not only gotten Google’s support to pursue the project, but that they have started working the technical details. As Googler Brad Fitpatrick writes today:

In other words, we’ve eliminated both technical & political hurdles. We can now work on this spec, implement, push, try, rinse, repeat…. until we’re all reasonable happy.

Googler Brett Slatkin (incidentally, Fitzpatrick’s partner in making PubSubHubbub) explains to us that while it hasn’t been turned on yet, and that there’s still a lot of work to do on the spec, the idea is to go into testing mode soon. Fitzpatrick notes that there will be a small experiment going on internally with some Googlers’ Gmail accounts.

Without knowing much about the technical details behind it, the core idea behind WebFinger immediately strikes me as a good one. It’s taking something everyone knows on the web (your email address) and making it immensely more valuable as a way to identify yourself and information about you. Exactly what kind of information? Here are some of the ideas from the WebFinger Google Code page:

• public profile data
• pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
• a public key
• other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
• a URL to an avatar
• profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
• whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
• or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

This is definitely something to watch for in the coming months.

[photo: flickr/chris owens]

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In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued without a hint of explanation about the reason for the folding, although we suspect it may have something to do with VeriSign taking over the service’s main backer late last year.

When FreeYourID launched in February 2007, we dubbed it a personalized OpenID, because it allowed users to register a unique .name domain name (e.g. first.last.name) which in turn could be used as a custom, personal OpenID identifier, website URL and e-mail host. The service was the result of a partnership between OpenID company JanRain and Global Name Registry, the domain name registry for the .name extension. Alas for them, it never got any significant traction.

Until August 15, 2009, users will be able to access and use their FreeYourID accounts to make changes to their .name domain names, extend the registration period with a payment or retrieve the authorization code needed to be able to transfer the domain name to another provider. If the domain name isn’t transferred to another party, dotname will transfer all remaining .name domain names to Key-Systems automatically.

The latter will let users who are still interested in the service change the e-mail and URL forwarding settings for their domain names and continue using OpenID.

FreeYourID, however, hits the deadpool.

E-mail in full (hat tip to @pascalvanhecke):

Dear Freeyourid.com user,

We will be discontinuing the Freeyourid.com service, which may affect the way you manage and pay for your .name domain name going forward, on August 15, 2009. Please note that until August 15, 2009, you will continue to be able to access and use your account on Freeyourid.com to make changes to your .name domain name, extend its registration period with a payment, or retrieve your “Transfer Auth Code” so that you can transfer your .name domain name to another provider. The extended registration period will be fully honored by the new provider.

Your .name domain name registration term will continue until its expiry; however, we will transfer your .name to Key-Systems GmbH, an ICANN-accredited registrar who we have selected as the new provider of the .name services (”Key-Systems”). Upon completion of the transfer to Key-Systems, you will receive an email with details on how to activate your new account. With Key-Systems, you will be able to continue to enjoy your .name address, change your email forwarding and web forwarding, use Open ID, and extend the registration of your .name address and email.

Please also note the following:

1. If you do nothing, we will transfer your .name domain to Key-Systems on August 15, 2009. Your username and password will not be transferred. As mentioned above, you will receive an email with a link to activate your new direct account with Key-Systems and to check your preset data. After activation, you will receive a new username and password.

2. If you do not wish for us to transfer your .name domain name to Key-Systems, please click here to log in to your account and let us know. Your .name domain name will then be deleted on the transfer date, allowing you to re-register it with another provider of your choice; however, any remaining time in your registration term will be forfeited and there will be no refunds for time not used. If you select this option, please be aware that someone else could register your .name domain name after it is deleted from our system before you register it directly again with a new .name domain name registrar of your choice. If you intend to keep your .name address, we strongly recommend allow us to transfer it to Key-Systems.

We have genuinely appreciated your use of the FreeYourID service and your .name domain name. We believe Key-Systems will continue to provide you with a positive experience so that you can enjoy of your .name address - your personal, memorable and lifelong address.

As always, thank you for using your .name domain name, we greatly appreciate it.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact VeriSign Customer Support at 703-925-6999 or email us at info@verisign-grs.com.

Sincerely,

PJ Bolanos
Vice President, Global Customer Support

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Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now out of “officially out of business” and winding down.

From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages:

Vidoopsters:

I am currently working with our counsel on next steps, but here is
what I know:

Vidoop LLC is officially out of business. Unfortunately, there are no
funds to pay the unpaid wages or other liabilities. I don’t yet know
if this means there will be a bankruptcy filing. However, we are in
the process of winding down and vacating the office.

Tomorrow and Friday we will be offering certain equipment such as
laptops and desktop computers to employees in lieu of a certain amount
of wages owed. As an example, a laptop might be worth $1000 in back
wages. You would only need to pay taxes on the actual book value of
the asset, which might be $250. So you would write a check for $0.153
on $250, or $38.25. The company’s liability to you would be reduced by
$1000, and you would have a laptop for $38.25.

The investors who walked out of the May 5 deal created a situation
that made an orderly shutdown impossible. However, several of us have
worked nonstop to preserve everyone’s stake in Vidoop, and efforts are
ongoing. We hope to provide details soon.

Thanks to everyone who is volunteering their time to help shut down
the office. There is simply no roadmap for a situation like this, and
I know it is frustrating. Your support during this difficult period
is very much appreciated.

Joel

It’s not clear how long the Vidoop service will remain active. The company promised “plenty of warning” of a shutdown of MyVidoop on May 14, but since then have been silent. There’s a ton of speculation in the email string (we aren’t posting most of it), but we’ll wait for an official company announcement. There’s also likely an interesting backstory around that “investors who walked out of the May 5 deal” statement.

We’ve put Vidoop in the deadpool.

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Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, it’s hard to create something that doesn’t fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.

Cuil is walking dead, for example, and Wikia Search is just dead. Other ambitious projects like SearchMe are dealing with tepid user enthusiasm, and Wolfram Alpha’s over-hype has cost it credibility.

Any search engine startup with a shred of common sense wouldn’t want to create a lot of hype about itself before launching. There are too many dead bodies lying around to prove how badly that strategy works.

But on the other hand: ambitious startups need to hire talented engineers, and they need lots of money. Crawling and indexing the web is expensive and requires thousands of servers. Those servers aren’t free. So there needs to be at least a little awareness of the startup out there for hiring and fundraising purposes.

New search engine startup Blekko has been trying to figure out exactly where pre-launch press should begin and end. They’ve said very little up to now and haven’t made any big promises at all. We first covered them in early 2008, and have subsequently noted some high profile investors that have put money into the project.

But that’s it. The company has said clearly that they don’t want press, and most bloggers and other journalists have respected that. Not only that, all their website has on it is a cute paper bag puppet. No ridiculous promises of anything at all. We had to beg them just to get a logo (the puppet looked absurd as their logo in CrunchBase).

So why the slight buzz yesterday and today? They’re preparing to launch later this year and they are raising more money to ramp up. They’re starting to show people a little more of the product. We’re impressed. As are others.

Is Blekko a Google killer? I don’t think so. And the company isn’t claiming that, either. But I do think they have a really cool search product that a lot of people are going to love. I look forward to writing about it when they prepare to launch.

But until then we’re going to give them the privacy they’ve requested to fully bake the product. Because the last thing we need is another over-hyped pre-launch search engine that’s called a failure just because they aren’t a Google slayer a week after launch.

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The last video interview I did at the Next09 conference in Hamburg that I wanted to feature here on TechCrunch is the conversation I had with mr. Captain Web 2.0 himself, open web advocate Chris Messina. Besides his involvements with Citizen Agency, the DiSo Project and Vidoop, Messina somehow finds the time to also be closely involved with the OpenID Foundation as a board member and persistent evangelist, so we talked about that a little.

As a reminder, OpenID is a decentralized, distributed single sign-on method that allows users to log onto many services with the same digital identity. That identity can be one of your current profiles on the web, in case the company you registered it with is an OpenID provider.

Most of the major players on the Internet are currently providers, including such companies as MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, AOL, and many more, but very few of them have actually become a relying party as well (which would allow someone to log onto Yahoo with their AOL id, for example).

About a year ago, Michael argued that companies who make a lot of noise when they become providers but don’t move (quickly enough) to also become relying parties could be exploiting the project for PR reasons and take the gain without the pain.

And truth be told, not much has changed since then, even if usage seems to be swinging upwards. Most of the big names that are issuing OpenID parties have yet to support the project by allowing users to effectively be able to sign in to their services with third-party digital identities. The big exception - surprisingly - is Facebook, the first big network that will truly embrace OpenID even if it has a service that competes directly with it (Facebook Connect). For more perspective on that, you should go read the guest post Facebook Connect and OpenID Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated”.

Anyway, Messina and I talked about the current state of OpenID, the love from Facebook, how he hopes the government will once become a massive relying party, the challenges ahead and more specifically if OpenID has a chance against Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Twitter Connect, etc.

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Apparently it’s embrace the developer community day at Facebook. In addition to the news that they are making activity stream data available to third party developers, they’ll also be making an announcement around OpenID, we’ve heard. And importantly, the announcement is that they’ll become what’s called a relying party, meaning anyone with an OpenID (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace are all issuers, and Microsoft is in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials.

Let me take a step back. OpenID is a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials. There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID framework - as “issuing parties” or as “relying parties.” Issuing parties make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing parties. Of course, sites can also be both. In fact, if they aren’t both it can be confusing and isn’t a good user experience.

All the big guys are now Issuing Parties, which allow their users logging in all over the Internet with those credentials. But none of them accept IDs from anywhere else, so anyone that uses their services has to create new credentials with them. It’s all gain, no pain. There are two exceptions - AOL Mapquest and Google’s Blogger - but for the most part the big guys are issuers, not relying parties. And that has led us in the past to accuse them of exploiting OpenID for their own benefit without giving back to the community. See our post Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?

Facebook has been a wild card with OpenID. They’ve talked about adopting it eventually, but their Facebook Connect product has actually muddled the situation - Facebook actually competes directly with OpenID when allowing users to sign in to third party sites via Facebook Connect.

Now that’s going to change, and we’ll soon see users have the ability to sign in to Facebook using, say, their MySpace credentials if they choose to. I like the thought of that.

But it still may be a while before we see the other major players take similar steps. Facebook has never really had notion of a user ID - you’ve always logged in with your Email address, which could have come from any number of other services, so Facebook isn’t really sacrificing much here. Instead of a user name, Facebook members are assigned a meaningless user ID number (though they’re experimenting with vanity pages).

Contrast that with Yahoo and Google, both of which have built up their own login systems, which can be used across multiple services using a single persistent account name. Users benefit because they can seamlessly jump between services, and Yahoo and Google get their users to stay within their own suite of products. There’s a good chance they’re not going to give that up so readily.

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Finding and registering an available domain name just became even easier. Now you can do it via Twitter thanks to Tweetname. Founder Philip Kaplan (aka “Pud,” the former CEO of AdBrite) argues that Tweetname makes domain purchasing much simpler than going through other domain registrars like GoDaddy, which requires you to actually go its site. In truth, it is not that complicated but Tweetname aims to make domain registering Tweet-simple. You set it up once and then it does all the work for you.

Once you log into Tweetname for the first time, the site uses OAuth to connect to your Twitter account. You fill out your credentials, including name, address, credit card info, billing info and then Tweetname automatically follows you and arranges for you to follow Tweetname.

After this is set up, you can Tweet a potential domain name via a direct message to Tweetname, and Tweetname within seconds will let you know if it is available (”Success!”) or not (”D’oh”), and will purchase and register the domain for you. Domains, which can be registered under .com .net .org .us .name .biz .info, cost $14.95. You then get an email with all the information about where you can manage the domain. Tweetname provides users a free interface where they can manage their domains, set up email addresses, set up url forwarding, and so on.

Here’s a instructional video that shows how Tweetname works:

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