OpenID Updates, IP, Patents, and OSCON, oh my!

Scott Kveton recently posted a good article about OpenID IP and Patent concerns on his blog. For anyone who has been following OpenID this is a worthwhile read.

David Recordon and Simon Willison gave an excellent OpenID Bootcamp tutorial at OSCON. Slides can be found up at http://www.slideshare.net/daveman692/openid-bootcamp-tutorial/.

Then, later on that same day, David and Simon joined Tim O’Reilly as a part of the Radar Executive Briefing and discussed OpenID , the briefing ended with a positive statement from Tim regarding OpenID being one of the technologies to really pay attention to this year.

Of course we agree, and want to get our prediction in now that there will be over 600 million OpenID users by the end of 2007…

In related news David Recordon won Google’s prestigious “Best Strategist” open source award for his work on OpenID and the OpenID Foundation awards first code bounties.

~Kevin Fox

Some New OpenID Enabled Sites

Just a quick note to mention some new additions to our MyOpenID site directory:

Twitterfeed is OpenID enabled and lets you do a number of interesting things with Twitter. Including getting your Pownce messages to Twitter!

I received an email from Adam Frey last week informing me that Wikispaces now supports OpenID and that they found MyOpenid.com to be helpful in their testing. **Update** New users can join with an OpenID account, and existing users can now associate their OpenID with their wikispaces account. See Adam’s comments below for directions on how to associate your OpenID account to your account on wikispaces.

~Kevin Fox


Wetpaint also recently integrated OpenID, “Wetpaint is excited to welcome OpenID users, who can now sign in with their OpenID credentials and start contributing to any of the over 400,000 Wetpaint Wiki communities.”

Toodledo is an task manager with an incredible list of features; OpenID being a recent addition. If you are looking for a feature rich task manager check it out.

If you are interested in making sure you stay up to date with all recent MyOpenID directory entries please subscribe to our RSS feed.

Will the real Single Sign On Solution please stand up…

There have been some recent observations made about the future of big social networks and single sign on. The general question has been whether a technology like OpenID can help or whether it will be supplanted by an identity widget launched by one of the big guys. Of course in the argument between Facebook or OpenID, we have to weigh in on the OpenID side noting that they are not mutually exclusive.

With over 100 million OpenID identities created, OpenID is not going away. The momentum of OpenID and fact that Facebook is working with Open Source companies like Six Apart certainly makes it plausible we could see Facebook support for OpenID in the future. Ideally we would like to see all platforms support OpenID authentication at some point.

Obviously the larger social networks have fewer incentives to embrace OpenID than emerging ones such as Plaxo, and we believe in the end the winner will be the network that truly delivers on the promise of an portable identity / social addressbook. In his blog post Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect Joseph Smarr says it well:

“I completely share the vision of an open social web in which users are in control of their data and they can use it on any web site they come to or from. Plaxo gets it too, and our mission is clear: to knock down every wall we find and free your data until nobody owns who you know except you.”

and we completely agree!

If you have any questions about OpenID or this post please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb:

~Kevin Fox

JanRain Announces Non-Assertion Covenant for OpenID

JanRain would like to officially announce it is issuing a “non-assertion covenant,” promising that JanRain, Inc. will not enforce patents against developers implementing OpenID technology. This follows similar announcements from Sun and Verisign and is a positive step forward for the OpenID community at large.

In plain terms this announcement means that JanRain will not impose licensing terms, conditions, or fees for the use of any patents held by JanRain related to OpenID V1.1, OpenID Simple Registration V1.0 or Yadis Discovery Protocol V1.0. Like Sun and Verisign, the only condition is that developers refrain from asserting their own (or others’) patents against any other OpenID implementation developer. If you are an OpenID developer you do not need to do anything in order to get this assurance; no licenses need to be applied for, in fact don’t even think about licensing. All that needs to be done is for an OpenID developer to refrain from attempting to enforce their own (or others’) patents against any developer implementing OpenID.

Read on for the official legalese…

JanRain OpenID 1.1 Non-Assertion Covenant

JanRain, Inc. irrevocably covenants that, subject solely to the conditions described below, it will not assert any of its U.S. or foreign patents, having claims necessary for the implementation of the OpenID Specifications listed below, against that portion of a product that implements the covered specifications listed below (OpenID 1.1 Implementation).

Conditions: this covenant shall not apply with respect to:

1. any individual, corporation or other entity that asserts or threatens at any time to enforce its own or any other party’s U.S. or foreign patents against any OpenID 1.1 Implementation; or
2. for implementations that are not required by the listed Specifications or can be implemented by an alternative design not covered by JanRain’s patents and still be in conformance with the Specifications.

This statement is not an assurance either:

1. that any of JanRain’s issued patents cover an OpenID 1.1 Implementation or are enforceable; or
2. that an OpenID 1.1 Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.

No other rights except those expressly stated in this Non-Assertion Covenant shall be deemed granted, waived, or received by implication, or estoppel, or otherwise.

Specifications Covered:

OpenID Authentication V1.1

OpenID Simple Registration Extension V1.0

Yadis Discovery Protocol V1.0

If you have any questions about OpenID or this announcement please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb:

~Kevin Fox

Mr. Livingstone, I presume…

There is an interesting post over on Scott Kveton’s blog relating to where the official OpenID project website really is… Much ado about .org fills us in on the history of OpenID dot org and OpenID.net and makes it crystal clear that indeed OpenID.net is the place to go to learn more about OpenID and interface with the OpenID community.

If you have any questions about OpenID please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb:

~Kevin Fox

OpenID Satisfaction

Reading through blogs looking for OpenID posts I found a useful post from a satisfied OpenID and Pibb user. Do You Have an ID? Indeed “I have an ID, OpenID”

Also in late, late, news OpenID beats out stiff competition and wins the ‘disruptor’ award at the NextWeb Awards 2007

~Kevin Fox

Plaxo Now Supports OpenID

Plaxo has recently released a beta of Plaxo 3.0 which includes support for OpenID. Plaxo also published an “implementation guide to accelerate its [OpenID] adoption across the industry, available online at http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid.” A recipe for OpenID-enabling your site is even provided by Plaxo’s own Joseph Smarr. His blog post explains more about the announcement…

This bit of news has led some to ponder whether Plaxo Could Be the Open Source Facebook.

We would love to see this happen as we just recently have been asked the question “Could OpenID be Our Savior to the Social Network Blues?” Of course our answer was yes, and with Plaxo’s announcement OpenID is one step closer to realizing the potential of portable identity and allowing people to break out of the monolithic identity silos of the past.

~Kevin Fox

Social Network Woes Eased by OpenID?

With the steady increase in the number of ‘Social Network Sites’ over the past year, and being that JanRain is all about OpenID, we are definitely interested in the question “Could OpenID be Our Savior to the Social Network Blues?” Well, the short answer is Yes!

The longer answer is that with the attribute exchange feature in the soon to be released OpenID 2.0 spec you can specify custom fields for your online persona. For example a ‘friends’ field could be populated with a list of the OpenID accounts for your family, friends, and professional network. This field, if requested from a relying party (Social Network Site X) could then be passed on and automatically populate your network.

Thats the beauty of OpenID, its single-sign on and identification for users across websites, applications, networks. It enables portable identity, and shifts ownership of the user to the user. This gives people the opportunity to use their identities for reputation, social exchange, communications, and more.

If you have any questions about OpenID please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb:

~Kevin Fox

Pibb Now Accepts AOL Screennames for Login… and More

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks has done a write up of the new, ‘friendlier’ Pibb. New features include a Channel Directory, the ability to view content anonymously and to login with your AOL screen name or LiveJournal account directly.

JanRain CTO, Michael Graves, also shares his thoughts on the current development of Pibb and how it plays into the “ecosystem that OpenID enables”.

~Kevin Fox

Pibb Welcomes Ron Paul Supporters…

We are pleased to welcome supporters of Ron Paul to the Ron Paul channel on Pibb. Click on the icon below to be taken directly to the channel:

For more information please check out RonPaulChat.com. This site is not part of the official Ron Paul 2008 campaign. If you would like official info, please go here.

[…] If you’re new to Ron Paul please check out his website, watch his videos, and learn as much as you can. Ron Paul is the leading advocate for freedom in our nations capitol. He has consistently defended individual liberty, and staunchly upheld his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Oh, and he has 20-year congressional voting record to back it up. So learn about him, hear his message and make your own decision. […]

A big thanks to David Watson who is the Topeka, KS Meetup.com coordinator, for getting all of this going!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for the RonPaul Channel:
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~Kevin Fox