Derivadow

Online Identity just got really interesting and really competitive… lets hope the open stack wins not the proprietary

Biggest Battle Yet For Social Networks: You, Your Identity And Your Data On The Open Web
Facebook makes their big press push for their ‘Facebook Connect‘ service, MySpace have ‘Data Availability‘ and Google ‘Friend Connect‘. Sites that use these services make life a bit easier for them, but the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc. The real risk with Facebook is the proprietary login and data sharing standards, Myspace is so much better with its use of open standards including OpenID and their willingness to work with Google (Facebook have prohibited Google from getting in the middle).

Crime fighting team by ittybittiesforyou. Some rights reserved.

David Recordon considers “Getting OpenID Into the Browser” [O'Reilly Radar]
Google Chrome did a smart thing: Less. They unified the search box and address bar, since that’s what people do anyway. That gives us back precious pixels for the only thing that’s as important to an average web user as where they’re going: Who they are. Identity belongs in the browser.

Some interesting thoughts on near future of the web

User Styling – bit of custom css and you can get the site to look the way you want [24 ways via @fantasticlife]
Override a publishers styling, remove ads whatever you like. It’s interesting to consider the implications of this if, as @fantasticlife suggests, this goes more mainstream since it will change the role of design – the publisher gives you the data you presented as you want it.

Going Hyper-Local – Location Based Internet [redcatco.com]
Fire Eagle, Flickr, Twitter, Dopplr, BrightKite and many more help you tell the web about where you are – and then find people near you.

The enterprise is about control and the web is about emergence but for how long? [O'Reilly Radar]
I suspect it’s more likely the result of large scale system dynamics, where the culture of control follows from other constraints. If multiverse advocates are right and there are infinite parallel universes, I bet most of them have IT enterprises just like ours; at least in those shards that have similar corporate IT boundary conditions. Once you have GAAP, Sarbox, domain-specific regulation like HIPAA, quarterly expectations from “The Street,” decades of MIS legacy, and the talent acquisition realities that mature companies in mature industries face, the strange attractors in the system will pull most of those shards to roughly the same place. In other words, the IT enterprise is about control because large businesses in mature industries are about control. On the other hand, the web is about emergence because in this time, place, and with this technology discontinuity, emergence is the low energy state.

The Future of Ephemeral Conversation [Schneier on Security]
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.

Some photo stuff

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Find Flickr photos my colour [Multicolr Search Lab]
They are extracting the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr and then use “visual similarity technology” so you can navigate the collection by colour.

Some BBC stuff

BBC Programmes iPhone webapp experiment [Whomwah.com]
Another nice bit of hacking from Duncan – browse BBC TV and Radio schedules on your iPhone, the iPhone way – living further out of London with longer train journeys has improved his hacking output.

BBC builders: Tom Scott, and the team behind /programmes and /music [guardian.co.uk]
That’s me! Jemima Kiss has started interviewing folk at the BBC who are helping to build projects that people don’t hear about. She started with me, which was jolly nice.