Facebook begins support for OpenID

Image via CrunchBase

I've been critical of Facebook's lack of openness in the past so I need to give them a massive shoutout now: Facebook’s OpenID Goes Live

Later today Facebook will officially become an OpenID relying party. What does that mean? It that if you wish to register for Facebook using another OpenID provider, you can. Initially the service will not be completely open though. As Facebook will post later today, “To start, new users can now register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts, and existing users can link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider to connect with friends and eliminate the need for multiple sign-ins.

This is really big news. I'd pretty much backed completely out of Facebook over their closed nature. This move brings me back. The hiatus is over.

That Facebook was the first of the really big players to accept OpenID from third parties is huge. May the remaining dominoes begin to fall. Thank you Facebook!

UPDATE: It was there just like them promised. I set it up, and it works totally sweet. This is most excellent!!!

Always up and the cloud

Image via Wikipedia

I find this discussion of 100% uptime quite interesting: Google Outage Shows the Cloud May Not Be Enterprise-Ready

Google and other cloud-based services have been experiencing outages of several hours' duration throughout 2009. While that may be fine for members of the general public, who can live with e-mail occasionally being down for an hour, it is of potential concern for businesses of all sizes, including larger enterprise companies, where constant uptime equals revenue and even survival. Are services such as Google Apps and Microsoft Azure ready to meet that need?

I remember a saying back in the day, and it revolved around emergency services like 9-1-1, that when it absolutely had to run you chose Unix. Of course, Unix-based systems didn't run 100% of the time. You can create redundant systems all you want, but they still are not going to run 100% of the time. Nothing runs 100% of the time.

I'm reminded of when I moved to Iowa from California to attend graduate school. This was back in the 80s. One of my first tasks as part of my instructorship was to help in organizing a big conference. I worked on it for months. When the day of the conference finally arrived, we had this massive snow storm and the event was canceled. Canceled just like that. No one gave it a second thought. I'd never experienced a blizzard before. I was distraught. All that work. All that money. Poof!

The people I worked with on the other hand, were totally unconcerned. Of course, they were way smarter than me. They'd learned to accept that snow happens. I still had to learn that lesson, but eventually I came to look at snow events as opportunities. An opportunity to slow down. An opportunity to do something different. Snow helped to put things in proper perspective. The sky wasn't going to fall.

That's how I feel about cloud computing as well. If you can't get to the servers, who cares, the world isn't going to come to an end. If you live in Iowa you come to accept snow as a sometimes inconvenient aspect of life. Same thing with the cloud. If you live in the cloud you realize that sometimes those clouds might be cumulus, and at other times they might be funnels. You'll be far healthier and happier if you just think of a cloud failure as something akin to a naturally occurring phenomenon.

I think there is a freeranging lesson here.

Wolfram|Alpha Error Message

I was fooling around with a link to Wolfram|Alpha that actually works, and after several test entries it spit out this error message:

I'm prepared to declare that this will be a huge hit based on the coolness factor of that error message. From Wikipedia: Wolfram Research

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, as it does not look up answers to queries on an index of web pages or documents. Queries and computations are similarly posed to it via a text field, but it computes answers and relevant visualizations on the fly from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

In 2009 it's hard to beat humans.

HighTouch Book Club: The next read

I'm almost finished reading What Would Google Do?. I have 31 pages to go. It'll take me a bit longer to get my notes up on FriendFeed: Hightouch Book Club, but I think it's safe to say we're within a week of starting the next read.

It's time to pick the next book. Rule #1 in the book club is:

I pick a book. (I'm open to suggestions, however.)

The next book will be The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt. I wanted to announce the book early just in case you're interested in reading along.

If you would like to influence the choice for the read following Whuffie speak now...

When I visited B&N to pick up Whuffie I also purchased, The Philosophy of John Dewey which includes two volumes: The Structure of Experience, and The Lived Experience. I'm thinking this book won't fit the primary criteria of the book club, "the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined)." If I get into it and decide it might work I'll add it to the list.

I want Google Analytics everywhere

Image via CrunchBase

I was kicking the tires on a new site this morning, posterous.com. Their tagline, "the dead simple place to post everything." Getting started is as easy as sending an email to post@posterous.com. You account and domain will be automically created. It couldn't be easier.

If you want, however, to customize your site a bit it can be done. I was customizing my posterous page when I got a huge surprise: Setting up Google Analytics. Are you kidding me? This is something I asked for almost two years ago: Privacy - yearning for yesteryear:

In a transparent world I should have the ability to see who is looking at my information. I want my Google Analytics capabilities extended to every location where I post content. If you're looking at photos of my children on Flickr I should be able to see that. If you're hanging on my every Twitter post -- I should know that too. Transparency needs to be a two-way street. We need our social networking sites to open-up and allow us to embed tracking scripts on our personal pages.

That Posterous is allowing me to embed my Analytics script is very cool. I can't believe that someone hasn't done this sooner. (Does anyone know of other sites that provide this capability?) As said previously, Google Analytics will become the neighborhood watch of the Internet. This kind of stuff is going to be huge. I want these sort of capabilities everywhere a piece of me lives on the Internet.

Your Web site strategy: What's plan B?

We've been saying this for a long time. Treat every page as a standalone site. Quit wasting your time and energy trying to control your Web site visitors. They are in charge, they have the back button. It's a good read: The End of the Destination Web Era

In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What's worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.

If your strategy is to build a destination Web site and bottle content, what's your back-up plan?