April 2007

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Leaving JanRain

April 30, 2007 in Identity, JanRain, OpenID by kveton | 14 comments

If you’ve bumped into me (or I’ve cornered you) in the last year I’m sure you’ve heard me talking about OpenID. You know that digital identity is something that I’m really passionate about and I truly believe this technology is going to have a significant impact on the web over the next few years. Empowering users to easily identify themselves, shaking up social networking and enabling relevant and compelling conversations are all on the horizon with OpenID as the foundation. As such, you can imagine how hard it is to write this blog post.

I have stepped down as CEO of JanRain as of Friday afternoon. As a father of two children under 3 years old, I really need to be home more. For the past year I’ve been traveling and commuting with a rough schedule for the wife and kids. My wife Kami has been absolutely heroic in her support of me and my work at JanRain but as a father and a husband, I’ve got to be there for them more.

I’d like to make it clear that this is an amicable split and I’m still on great terms with the team at JanRain. They are the leaders of a very exciting space, they have amazing technical and management teams in place and I know they will be successful in the direction they are headed.

I’ve had an amazing 10 months helping develop and participate in the OpenID eco-system and its been a pleasure getting to know everyone in the space. I’m amazed at the vibrant and diverse set of people that are making this all happen. Thanks to the OpenID community for being so fantastic.

I’m going to take a few weeks off and figure out where/what I want to do next. Its a good time to take a break, spend some quality time with the family and set a course for the future. Keep an eye on this space to see where I end up … :-)

I’m at Mix ‘07 this week doing a panel on identity and wrapping up any final threads. If you want to chat with me in person, find me on twitter or you can always find me at scott at my last name dot com.

Thanks again everybody.

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myOpenID release & redesign

April 17, 2007 in General, JanRain, OpenID by kveton | 8 comments

Its with great pleasure that I get to announce the release of the latest version of myOpenID.com with some exciting new features and a fresh new look.

myOpenID logo

Phishing is always on the minds of members of the OpenID community and we’re excited to announce the release of our client-side certificate functionality. Client-side certificates leverage the tried-and-true technology known as transport layer security (also known as TLS). This essentially the same technology you probably know of as SSL that is used to secure millions of transactions on the web every single day. With the click of a mouse you can configure your own unique certificate right in your web browser (yep, Firefox, IE, Safari and even Opera). This then gives you the ability to authenticate quickly and very securely from your machine without the use of a password.

The redesign of the site has been on-going and this is phase 1 of the re-work of myOpenID. We’ve been working with the amazing talent at Refresh Media. These are the same folks that did our corporate website at janrain.com. We’re excited about the new layout and the team here has been working day-and-night to get this ready for Web 2.0 Expo. Great work guys!

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing some new services that allow you to take advantage of what it means to have an OpenID. We’re excited about what’s happening with this great technology and community and can’t wait to start really shaking some things up.

Web2Open & Mashroom events

April 13, 2007 in Identity, JanRain, OpenID, web2open by kveton | 2 comments

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Are you going to Web 2.0 Expo? If so, you’ve got to spend some quality time in the Web2Open area of the show.

Chris Messina is back at it again rallying the troops for a BarCamp-style event that O’Reilly is hosting right in Moscone alongside Web 2.0 Expo. The Mashroom should be a fun event a chance for people that want to hack on some things with the brightest of the bright minds in the industry. If you’re at Web 2.0 Expo you should at least stop by and check out the Mashroom.

The OpenID community will be out in full force as well with talks from Brian Ellin and David Recordon about implementing OpenID. Kaliya will also be on hand talking about user-centric identity. Finally, a couple of great folks from AOL are going to be taking a deeper dive into user-centric identity and Web 2.0.

I’ll be there with Mike Graves our new CTO cruising the showroom floor, attending parties and the Mashroom. If you’re in town and want to connect just look for me there … would love to chat with folks about OpenID and the exciting new myOpenID features we’re releasing on Tuesday!

State of OpenID - April 2007: By the numbers

April 2, 2007 in Identity, JanRain, OpenID by kveton | 3 comments

It being April 2nd (btw - thanks for all of the crazy stop-my-heart OpenID posts yesterday) I thought it would be a great time to give an update on the “State of OpenID”. I’m going to try to do this every few months (like once a quarter) as people keep asking me for graphs and numbers and I might as well just blog about it and let folks take it from there.

Now this isn’t the final word, I just thought I would gather a few statistics as well as talk about where we’re at as a community. Your mileage may vary … by all means, comment below.

(Full disclosure: I run a company called JanRain which is participating in the OpenID community by developing open source libraries as well as developing sites like MyOpenID and Jyte.)

Adoption continues: The last three months have seen some amazing adoption rates. AOL and WordPress have come up as OpenID providers. Sites like 37signal’s Highrise, AOL’s Ficlets and Ziki have come along with strong support for OpenID. Digg and Netvibes also announced support coming in the next few months.
User totals: With the addition of AOL’s 63 million users, it puts the OpenID enabled user eco-system somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 million users. Now, not all of these users know they have an OpenID yet but hopefully that will change over time.

More sites coming on-line: From the perspective of MyOpenID.com we’ve seen over 2000 unique OpenID enabled sites September 2005. The vast majority of these have come in the last three months. These numbers take into account things like unreachable hosts, non-existent domains and strange ports, etc. This number is currently growing at 25 - 30 new sites a day and has continued at 5 - 7% growth week-over-week for the past 3 months. (See graph)
OpenID 2.0 continues to bake: OpenID 2.0 continues to bake with Sxip Identity releasing open source libraries for Java and Perl. JanRain recently announced the release candidate for Python with PHP and Ruby close behind. As more people begin to use the libraries and vet the latest version of OpenID, I think we’ll get closer to the much anticipated “final” version. OpenID Attribute Exchange also continues to come along as well.
More servers than sites: A strong theme across the OpenID eco-system is that so many sites are coming up as just providers and not consumers. So you can use your account as an OpenID but you can’t bring your existing OpenID in from another site to login.
Integrated social networking: Sites like videntity and claimID are now hooking together OpenID and microformats to help provide for the first distributed social networking schemes. These are the seeds of something really exciting; the ability to tie single sign-on with portable social networking means we can quickly login to any site and then pull our social networks along with us. Its going to take time and quite a bit more work to get sites to adopt a standardized means for doing this but its inevitable now that OpenID is taking hold.