March 2007

On Monday, AOL/Netscape (yes, they are the same company) will launch consumer support for OpenID on their Netscape and My.Netscape sites.

This is great news as we’ll have another couple of great sites supporting the OpenID protocol. The only drawback is that you will actually need to create a “real” account on those sites and then associate your OpenID to the account. Logging in from there on out you can use your OpenID from where ever you get it.

This is great step forward though. These things take time and I’m very impressed with AOL’s aggressive adoption of OpenID. We need more companies to step up to the plate and do the same … *hint* *hint* … :-) I do like how they did the association; this could become the defacto standard for how people associate and link their existing accounts (like Digg, Netvibes, etc) and folding it into the one OpenID that you use everywhere. No need to start over, you can still be the great Digg user or wiki contributor as before.

Great work AOL & Netscape, hats off to you.

Great day yesterday in Austin, TX … totally fun, great crowd and amazing turnout. What I love about SXSW is that being in Austin its central to the US. This means its easy to for anybody to get to it … for the East or West coast its 3 hours. Not only that, its in early March … nothing happens in March and the weather here is amazing. Sunny, 80 degrees or so (although a little humid) … :-)

Twitter is the thing of the conference … so many people are using Twitter its amazing. They have a great flat panel Flash app that is showing the latest Twitter updates in the main registration area. Absolute genius.

The evening was good as well. Lots of parties, lots of people, lots of lines and lots to drink … haha … :-) Austin has a great nightlife and I was amazed at how many people kept coming out of the woodwork … not all of them were SXSW people either. Really fun.

Looking forward to today; lots of good panels ahead and the trade show floor opens up as well. Bummer I’m heading out tonight for Portland … would love to hang out for a few more days with everybody.

Tack up another 1 million OpenID enabled users on our march to 100 million users. WordPress.com today announced support for OpenID. Word on the street is that Simon Willison helped make this happen for the folks at Automattic. This, of course, answers something Jyte users have been asking for for awhile:

Unfortunately, you cannot login to WordPress (at least from what I can tell) with an external OpenID. This means that WordPress.com is just a provider of OpenID’s and not a consumer of OpenID’s. So I can’t use my MyOpenID or my LiveJournal OpenID post comments on WordPress.com blogs. Hopefully support for that will be coming soon.

Congrats to Matt and the rest of the WordPress team on this. Now we’ll really start to see some interesting applications appear for OpenID now that more and more blogging sites are supporting the technology.

I thought I would mention it here, even though its been mentioned in other places, that today PBwiki has acquired our wiki site Schtuff.

We’re excited about this acquisition for a couple of reasons. For one, the Schtuff community gets a great new home in PBwiki. Over the past few months our focus as a company has really turned to OpenID and our identity related products. We really want to become the OpenID company and to do that, we have to stay focused on all things OpenID. Secondly, PBwiki is going to support OpenID! This will take a month or two for them to get going but we’re really excited about this!

Please let me know if you have any questions/comments/concerns about this. We want to ensure this transition is a smooth one.

Thanks everybody!