Scott Kveton

Ignite Portland is tonight … don’t miss it!! Should be a great crew out and this is such an event that Portland is dying for. Shout out to Josh, Raven, Dawn and Todd for making it all a reality. They really put the hard work in to make this thing happen and I can’t wait to see the outcome.

I’ll be speaking on “Free beef and clean bathrooms: the irrelevance of Web 2.0″ … hint: this has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, computers or Web 2.0 … :-)

See you there Portland!

David and I have been in Tulsa today working with the Vidoop crew getting the new website all dialed up. We’ve just re-launched after a solid day of working on things. Huge props go out to the smart guys here at Vidoop … couldn’t have done this without you guys.

This was a good week of planning and making this a reality but we’re far from over. We had made a few runs at getting the site to where it needs to be in the past but couldn’t get consensus. Instead of trying to do a big get-everybody-on-the-same-page kind of meetup or mailing list thread, I just decided to rally the troops to get this done and moving forward. I’m really glad with the progress we’ve made with the website today as well as the OpenID Foundation over the last couple of weeks. The best is yet to come folks.

I hope you like the new site but if you don’t, great! Get your suggestions to us and let’s make it better!

Yesterday the OAuth 1.0 specification was announced as final. This has been brewing for a few months and I’m amazed at the work that Chris and Blaine and the rest of the specification editors that have been working on this.

For those that don’t know, OAuth can best be described from the site itself:

The answer is simple, OAuth attempts to provide a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their passwords (and other credentials).

The launch of OAuth 1.0 reminds me a lot of the early days of OpenID. A small group of people leading with code and solutions has come together to build a fantastic solution to the API key problem. A light-weight technology that does one thing really, really well. That’s really cool and they did it in record time.

I’ve had quite a few people ask me “Why isn’t this a part of OpenID?” Again, the answer is best explained from the oAuth website:

The answer is simple, OAuth attempts to provide a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their passwords (and other credentials). If OAuth depended on OpenID, only OpenID services would be able to use it, and while OpenID is great, there are many applications where it is not suitable or desired.

Now, I actually think the two are really complimentary because OpenID doesn’t solve the API key problem. As a matter of fact, it makes it even more difficult. Using OpenID and oAuth together mean we can authenticate via OpenID and hand out oAuth keys to allow out-of-band access for web services or desktop applications. This is fantastic. Now we’re getting some very interesting technologies that are describing the open web.

Congrats to the OAuth crew for getting 1.0 out the door!