Scott Kveton

I did a talk at Ignite Seattle last week and it was a total blast. I love the 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide format. The scary thing about this is that I was able to get everything across that I wanted to in just 5 minutes. Why on earth have I ever needed an hour to give a talk?! :-)

Click To Play

You can view the video here.

Wow! What a morning! The news is out that we just got selected for this year’s Business 2.0 Next Net 25 list.

This year we’re in there with the likes of Meebo (love this app), Joost, StumbleUpon and Wikia (Jimmy Wales wiki startup). Last years selections included Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot and Writely … oh, and of course YouTube … :-)

We’re really honored and the whole crew here at JanRain is just ecstatic. The best is yet to come.

Very exciting news from the Future of Web Apps conference going on in London right now. Digg will support OpenID.

Lots of coverage already:

• GigaOm: Digg to Support OpenID
• Vecosys: Digg will support OpenID
• TechCrunch: Kevin Rose at FOWA Digg Adopts OpenID

So what does this mean? It means that OpenID is happening. This in addition to the recent trends is another indication that OpenID is here to stay.

Do you want to get up and running with OpenID quickly? Head over to OpenIDEnabled.com and read about delegation, find the libraries you need to enable your projects and sites and just learn more about OpenID as a whole.

Are you interested in getting users of your site OpenID’s? Check out the MyOpenID affiliate program. We also have a site API that allows you to create new API’s for your own users and domain name that is managed by MyOpenID. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at all!

Its been an amazing couple of weeks for the OpenID community. Microsoft and AOL have announced support of OpenID. AOL’s 63 million users and Six Apart’s 16 million users are all OpenID enabled. More sites are coming on-line that support OpenID: Jyte, Zooomr and Ma.gnolia all allow you to login with it.

We at JanRain have been working hard to deliver new services like Jyte (check out Jyte Spy!) as well as continue to develop the MyOpenID site into the premier OpenID provider with new anti-phishing and convenience features just added. More features are on the way!

The 52,000+ MyOpenID users have logged into over 1200 unique sites that support OpenID (see the graph). A lot of these users are coming via our affiliate program and site API that each allow web sites to integrate OpenID creation into their sign-up process. We’ve found that a lot of sites just want to use OpenID, not manage identities. These programs are perfect for you if you just want to focus on your “main thing”. The partnership with GNR on their FreeYourID service uses this new site API.

Avery Glasser has just published a report that details the usage patterns that Ma.gnolia (social bookmarking site) has seen from users that are using OpenID on their site. Ma.gnolia adopted OpenID in mid-December along with supporting their existing login system. The gist is that its all good news. OpenID users are more engaged and much stickier to the site and this is real data speaking to what we’ve been saying for months.

How can you get involved? Easy. Get an OpenID for starters. Try logging into one of the many sites that support and see for yourself just how great the web can be with one username and password. OpenID enable your project or site … head over to OpenIDEnabled.com and find the libraries, tools and test suites you need to do so. Finally, (last but not least), join the OpenID community. Head over to openid.net and join the mailing lists, participate in the wiki and help continue OpenID’s amazing success.

What’s coming next? The applications. We see new sites coming on-line all the time (about 10 – 15 new OpenID enabled sites everyday) and they are really amazing. OpenID is more than just getting closer to the one username, one password solution … this is much bigger than that. OpenID is going to bring in a new age of connectedness and interoperability that we just haven’t been able to conceive of before. Social networking, communications, reputation and trust will all be significantly impacted by OpenID in the coming years and the best applications are yet to come.

What a great time I had at Ignite Seattle last week. Its a geek-heavy event that couples making cool things as well as speed rounds for talks. In all, 22 people spoke (each for 5 minutes; 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) with about 400 people in attendance when all was said and done.

I was lucky enough to be one of the earlier speakers and I got to talk about OpenID (can you believe it?!). It was really cool when Brady introduced me and so many people applauded and ooh’d and aah’d when he mentioned I was going to talk about OpenID. Some folks have put up my slides and even talked about my talk. Very cool (and yet quite surreal).

My favorite picture that I found was this one that really shows the enormity of the event … very cool! Yep, that’s me up there talking about how OpenID is sweeping the nation! Thanks Brady and the rest of the Ignite Seattle crew for having me!

Videos are on the way and will be here when they get uploaded. I’ll post an update to this when its up.

It didn’t occur to me until chatting with Dave Hersh over dinner last Thursday, that we Oregonians spend a lot of time thinking about tires. Its got to be because of Oregon’s own Les Schwab.

Les Schwab is the local town tire chain store and they’ve been around for years. Their signature services is legendary. When you pull up at one of their stores, they run, literally run, to your car to see how they can help. The first time they do it it kind of freaks you out (“What did I do wrong?!”).

One of the other traditions they have is “Free Beef” with the tires that you buy. That’s right. Buy a set of tires and get a bunch of free beef. We just had to buy a set of tires for our Honda Odyssey and along with it came this box of pepperoni and a big ole’ top sirloin steak. I’ve been seeing these ads on TV for years and it only just occurred to me that if you’re from out of state (like Dave is) that you might find it a little strange.

One more reason to love Oregon; free beef with the tires that you buy … :-)

This from the I’m-the-last-one-to-report department … :-)

John Panzer of AOL announced this morning that AOL is now supporting OpenID for all of their users. This means if you have an AOL account/screenname you can now use it as an OpenID. From the article:

• Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/screenname.
• This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
• We’re working with OpenID relying parties to resolve compatibility issues.
• Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier. (No Yadis yet.)
• We don’t yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we’re actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
• We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.

Great work John and the rest of the AOL gang! This is fantastic news and I know the OpenID community couldn’t be more excited!

Now, all you AOL users, head over to Jyte and start making some claims! :-)

We’re excited to announce our latest partnership with GNR (the folks who manage the .name registry) to help bring OpenID’s to the .name users everywhere. Now with just a few seconds you can register your very own .name domain name and get email, an OpenID and a whole lot more.

You can sign up today at FreeYourID.com. JanRain is providing the back-end OpenID services for the .name registry to handle the use of your .name as an OpenID. The registration is free for the first 90 days and then $10.95 US per year after that.

Many people have asked us if we could help manage the entire process of domain name registration and management of their OpenID and until now, we haven’t been able to do it. Fortunately, the GNR folks have made this super easy with their FreeYourID.com service and we’re excited to be helping them by providing the OpenID’s. We’re using OpenID delegation and our new site API on MyOpenID to make this happen.

For example, you can head over to FreeYourID.com and enter in a name like Larry Jones and you’ll then be presented with a series of options like larry.jones.name or lj.jones.name or lawrence.jones.name. You then get an email address of larry@jones.name, etc. Best of all, you can point your personal identity page anywhere you want. If you have a blog at username.livejournal.com, you can point your new .name at that and have it redirect there. You can even point at your own Jyte profile page to show off your claims, cred and contacts like I’ve done with scott.kveton.name … :-)

As always, any questions, comments or concerns, feel free to post them here! And go sign-up for your .name! :-)

I suppose if you’re reading this blog you probably aren’t interested in actually hear me talk about this stuff in person … haha …. :-) However, if you’re in Seattle next week on Tuesday evening I highly encourage you to come out to Ignite Seattle:

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking).

I’ll be speaking on OpenID and there will be many other speakers talking about art and law and technology. The talks are limited to 3 minutes … 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide … I love the format and if you get bored with a talk, you can just go get a drink and it will be over … :-)

Hope to see you there!

Where: CHAC
When: February 13th, 2007 – Starting at 6:30pm and going until late
Why: Because meeting in person and talking to other people is fun

The OpenID community has been having quite a few discussions about phishing and what we can do to help mitigate that problem. We have come up with a whole list of solutions that work together nicely to help address the problem. However, we are always looking to do more to help protect end-users and give them options to secure their digital identities.

I posted last week about some discussions that we had with Microsoft’s Kim Cameron (He posted on this as well). We at JanRain were left with a good feeling from the visit and were excited to take the next steps. Its with great pleasure that I’m able to make the following announcement:

Microsoft to Work With the OpenID Community, Collaborating With JanRain, Sxip, and VeriSign

JanRain, Microsoft, Sxip, and VeriSign will collaborate on interoperability between OpenID and Windows CardSpace™ to make the Internet safer and easier to use. Specifically:

As part of OpenID’s security architecture, OpenID will be extended to allow relying parties to explicitly request and be informed of the use of phishing-resistant credentials.

Microsoft recognizes the growth of the OpenID community and believes OpenID plays a significant role in the Internet identity infrastructure. Kim Cameron, Chief Architect of Identity at Microsoft, will work with the OpenID community on authentication and anti-phishing.

JanRain, Sxip, and VeriSign recognize that Information Cards provide significant anti-phishing, privacy, and convenience benefits to users. Information Cards, based on the open WS-Trust standard, are available though Windows CardSpace™.

JanRain and Sxip, leading providers of open source code libraries for blogging and web sites, are announcing they will add support for the Information Cards to their OpenID code bases.

JanRain, Sxip and VeriSign plan to add Information Card support to future identity solutions.

Microsoft plans to support OpenID in future Identity server products.

The four companies have agreed to work together on a “Using Information Cards with OpenID” profile that will make it possible for other developers and service providers to take advantage of these technology advancements.

OpenID has always been about convergence. When Brad, David and Johannes talked about how OpenID and Yadis could work together over a year ago. When the XRI folks brought their amazing people and technology to be integrated into OpenID 2.0 last Spring. This past Summer when Sxip Identity joined the OpenID party by joining in on developing the specification and offering up their attribute exchange specification to the OpenID community. And now today, we have a commitment from Microsoft to take part in the OpenID community as well as enable the technology for their future identity products.

There are a couple of points I’d like to make outside of the above announcement to hopefully address any concerns that the OpenID community might have:

• JanRain will never require users of our libraries or services to use Windows CardSpace ™. We offer support for this technology as another option for users much like using our Safe SignIn and Personal Icon technologies on MyOpenID.com. We’ll also continue to support the OpenID efforts going on with Mozilla and Firefox.
• Windows CardSpace ™ is shipping with Vista today and is a well thought-out technology that helps address many of the privacy and security concerns that people have had with OpenID. OpenID helps users describe their identity across many sites in a public fashion. The two together are very complimentary products and each has its strength.
• Microsoft did not cave in to the OpenID community and the OpenID community is giving nothing up to Microsoft. This is a collaboration on bringing the best technology to the marketplace as quickly as possible to help secure users and solve the single sign-on solution once and for all.
• Please reserve judgment on what this all means until you see it all work together. The technology is really quite simple and the ramifications for end-users is huge. It also goes a very long way to completely addressing the phishing concerns we’ve heard so much about.

As always, please feel free to comment here or on the OpenID General list with any questions, comments or concerns.

You can read more from others:
Kim Cameron, Microsoft,
Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity
Michael Graves, Verisign
David Recordon, Verisign
Johannes Ernst, NetMesh