Google is now an OpenID provider

With the current trend to open up it seems like everyone is competing to provide bits and pieces to the overall equation. Now Google has become an OpenID provider.

This happened shortly after Yahoo announced their upcomming OpenID support. Yahoo will go public beta end of January though. Google's OpenID works today.

The Google support is through Blogger.com. Meaning that the OpenID URL you submit to login is a URL to one of your blogs. At the moment you need to login to Blogger at http://draft.blogger.com/ - then update your Blogger profile. Currently it only works for blogs with a blogspot.com URL.

This is not a big surprise, especially since Blogger earlier enabled OpenID for comments.

And I just tried it. Did the trick for Dopplr login.

One question - what about blogs that are maintained by multiple persons? Will the blog URL be possible to use by all users who are registered to the blog?

The answer seems to be yes - if the other individual is admin of the blog. This means that such blog URLs will be possible to use by multiple persons, using each persons individual blogger login credentials.

By design or a "feature"? Guess it comes with the architecure. Might be a handy feature in some scenarios, but be aware that granting other people admin access to a blog might open up some OpenID sites for them.

Update 080129: Just noticed from a post at BloggerInDraft that the Blogger OpenID service can be used by any domain you own. This by using a delegate feature. Nice.

What's Knol? Let's check Wikipedia... It's 1.0!

I guess you have heard of Knol, the recent Google initiative in the area of user generated encyklopedia?

It didn't take long before Wikipedia had an article on Knol.

Personally I see two main differences between Wikipedia and Knol. Both of these somewhat counteracts the general "2.0"-trend as I see it:

One author/editor per article
Knol will, as I understand it, have one author per article. The idea is obviously to make it more transparant who wrote it, and thus increase the credibility of the article.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, have a more collaborational approach to articles. It is basically open for anyone to add and edit the information in an article. To me that adds value. More than one view will be represented in an article, and the whole community can contribute with knowledge.

Get paid by ads
Knol will have ads on each article, and the author will get income from the ads.

This will create a marketplace for the best (most used) words of course. Authors would probably strive to get popular words to write about. If you are driven by the potential revenue from the ads you would not like to write about some obscure, niche, word.

Knol is a standard encyclopedia
Together this two aspects makes Knol very much a standard encyclopedia to me. Just as in a printed encyclopedia the authors gets paid to write an article, and is to a very high degree responsible for the content.

Knol is more Web 1.0 than 2.0?
So - so far I do not see the level of collaboration in Knol that would make it a good collaborative approach. Yes, the set of articles (knols) is collected through some kind of crowd-sourcing. Just as Wikipedia. But the individual article is to a high degree controlled by a single editor.

Just as Web 1.0. A set of web sites, individually owned and loosely coupled through links.

Now, you can probably expect a set of social functionality. Such as the ability for readers to rank articles. But I still expect that there will be one article around each topic. Or? What do you think?

Google Social Contacts - Google Reader steps forward

I earlier asked where Google Contacts where. Then I thought that the new enhancements of Gmail included that.

Later I was a bit disappointed with the new contacts part of Gmail. It didn't seem to add any major improvement.

Now Google Reader has gone social. With the possibility for those of your friends you have in your Gmail chat/Gtalk address book to share interesting items with you.

Works quite well so far. I first noticed this two days ago when two of my friends' shared items turned up in my Google Reader.

Robert Scoble found that duplicates occured. If someone shared an item already in your feeds, or if multiple friends shared the same item. Interesting that the first comment on that post was from a Google Reader engineer - we might see some enhancements soon.


Also announced the same day from Google was Google Profiles. Your profile that will be shown ie when sharing items in Google Reader, but also in Google maps etc.

What's missing here?
The ability to update more that just your name, photo and web sites. It seems like a small step to add the possibility to edit and share other information to selected friends. Your email, phone, address etc. If that is added we get close to the Plaxo value statement, and things gets even more interesting.

All in all, this is very much in line with this article from the New York Times, and this post from Marc Canter talks about email as the basis for a Social Graph. Chris Brogan also had a post on this topic yesterday. Steve Rubel wrote a piece on portals' position in the Social Networking arena some time ago.

But - Google Contacts?
Still I don't see a really compelling address book from Google, but they might be getting there. I still miss an obvious interface towards my Google address book. And an inclusion of Social contacts updates like Plaxo do would be nice.

In the mean time
Feel free to add me as your friend to take part of my shared items. I would love to see yours!

I have not yet added any more friends than the two that initially showed up. It seems like you first need to add a friend to Gmail chat/Gtalk and then add them in Google Reader. As I have not used Gtalk that much I need to build that Social Graph a bit. I understand that the identity is maintained using your Gmail address. I normally do not use my Gmail address for emailing, thus I usually don't publish it.
If you care to add me it is johan(dot)myrberger(at)gmail(dot)com - drop me a mail or leave a comment so I can add you back.

See you (or at least your shared items) in Google Reader!

Here is Google Contacts!

I earlier asked where Google Contacts is.



Apparently it was not part of the OpenSocial announcement.


However it seems to be part of the upcomming new release of Gmail.

This post highlights a video from the Google Analyst Day where the new Gmail functionality was demonstrated.

It seems like the new contacts will "integrate across multiple Google products, including Docs and Calendar".

And this new functionality seems already to be available for some users. Not for me yet.

Waiting...

Google OpenSocial revealed

The news is out.

Techcrunch yesterday broke the news on Google OpenSocial, stated to go live tomorrow (Nov. 1st).

I first captured the news while walking to the bus, reading my morning tweets.
@jkuramot noticed how the news spread. Indeed - a blog search reveals a number of recent posts.
I also noticed that @jsmarr states that Plaxo is implementing the API.

So - what is this about?

OpenSocial is not another social network site.
It is partly capturing the need and discussion around the Social Graph, but goes beyond that.

The intention seems to create a common platform for developers that target SoNets (social networks). The API will publish a set of information from the SoNets that connects. Techcrunch mentions Orkut, Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning and a few others as initial partners.

Again, according to Techcrunch, the inital set of APIs will cover:

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input
from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at
social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

So, for developers it will mean common way to develop applications and widgets for all major social networks (excluding Microsoft Live Spaces and Facebook, at least initially as it seems). Leveraging the data around a user, and making it easy to develop things that will work with more than one SoNet. This is mainly a value proposition for each SoNet towards the developers community.

I also expect that the participating SoNets will to some extent be able to interwork. Perhaps not to the extent that you can "friend" an Orkut user from LinkedIn initially, but let's see...

...and for the user?

Yes, what will it mean for the user? We will find out pretty soon I expect, as the first implementation goes live.

I personally hope that I finally will have a way to find my friends and connections across all social networks. In an easier way than by importing my address book. Ie solving, at least partly, the Social Graph problem.

No doubt that a number of interesting usages of this API will emerge the next few month.

But where is Google Contacts?

Still, this does not address the lack of a decent address book utility among the Google set of applications. That was my prediction earlier around the awaited Google move. Seems I was wrong?

This surprises me. Surely Google must have a plan for this area?

Where is Google Contacts?

The latest couple of days the buzz has heated up around something new from Google.

It started a while ago when there was talks about Socialstream and the evolution of Orkut. That Google enhances in the Social network arena is expected. And Orkut might be a good starting point.

But.

Some rumours are talking about Google taking a meta role in social networking (ie as a provider of your social graph). In order to do this, starting from Orkut is not a good option.

You need to start from the address book.
Your social graph contains all people you know, and they might not yet (or ever..) be part of a social network application.

And Google are really weak in the address book area. Don't you think? It is actually odd that Google have a good calendar application. Calendars are definately not as mainstream as address books.

Thus I expect Google Contacts to be announced soon. Or Google Address Book. Or Google Rolodex.

What's your bet?

"Blogger in draft" - now with polls and enclosures

Blogger in draft, which I mentioned earlier, just added polls and enclosures as features.

Polls is good to have, although there's other options available as well.

The enclosure option is especially useful for podcasters I guess. Any podcasters out there using Blogger.com?

I am not able to use these feature fully on this blog though, as I currently publishes on an external FTP server. This seems to limit the available features and configuration options. not nice. Will have to try this on another blog.

I am still trying to figure out how I can make my domain "hosted" by Blogger.com. No luck so far. Any hints, please? (The issue seems to be on the provider who host my domain...)