fidzu : authentication

At F8 today, Facebook rolled out their Facebook Connect platform. With a small amount of code, other sites can integrate the Facebook identity system into their site. The keynote reminded me of early days of Microsoft as they rallied developers to build on their platform by explaining how the platform can help them and being inclusive. They even seemed humble as they talked about what they have done wrong in the past and then reaching out to developers asking for their feedback. They even have a fund and a competition for best applications.

Facebook Connect is a powerful identity system. Using Facebook Connect, a site gets access to the user's profile data and the users friends. For sites such as Digg and Movable Type that want to make users accountable for their activity, there is an implicit reputation of the user based on the depth of the profile. It is much more difficult for a spammer to build a Facebook identity to spam these participatory sites. Facebook is all about real identity rather then a fake persona. Facebook even has rich privacy controls so that users feel in control of who sees what.

The promise of OpenID was to make login simple and move profile data. A number of us have been looking at using OpenID to make an accountable web. Given the momentum and immediate value of a Facebook identity system and the lack of OpenID RP deployment, one wonders if the identity opportunities of OpenID have passed.

The announcement from MySpace supporting OpenID may enable a more open identity system to evolve, but Facebook has a compelling offering that provides significant value to sites - well, as soon as Facebook Connect is launched anyway.

23 Jul 2008 10:13pm GMT

We've got some great upgrades to our service ready, but we'll need to take the service offline to roll them out. So, myVidoop will be unavailable tomorrow morning (7/24/08) from 7am to 9am CDT. We'll be introducing some new features which we'll tell you about in a later blog post (or just check out the site tomorrow after 9am).

23 Jul 2008 8:26pm GMT

We are very proud that Chris Messina (aka @factoryjoe), a recent addition to the Vidoop team, has recently received the award for 'best community amplifier'. You can read about the history and see past winners at the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards - Hall of Fame but the general idea is…

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards have been presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source.

Winners are selected by a committe, made up of the following: Allison Randal, (The Perl Foundation & O'Reilly - OSCON Co-Chair), Brady Forest (O'Reilly - Technology Evangelist and Conference Chair), Brian Behlendorf (CollabNet CTO and Founder), Chris DiBona (Google, Open Source Programs Manager), Danese Cooper (Open Source Diva, Intel), David Ascher (CTO, ActiveState, and director, Python Software Foundation), Tim O'Reilly (Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media), Nat Torkington (O'Reilly - OSCON Co-chair), Zaheda Bhorat (Google, Open Source Programs Manager).

Chris has consistently been at the forefront of the Open Web movement and an outspoken advocate of open source technologies. Since being introduced to him and the open web/identity community a little over a year ago, he has personally been very helpful in navigating the landscape, making introductions and genuinely a fun guy to hang out with. I am sure I join the rest of the Vidoop team and web community at large in congratulating Chris on a job well done and wishing him continued success in whatever ventures he pursues. Whatever it is, the web will be better off because of it

23 Jul 2008 4:37am GMT