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Posts Tagged ‘Enthused’

Firefox’s Plan to Kick the Login’s Butt

Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management.

The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.

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Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website.

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, “Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook… This is just one more chapter in a much larger story – but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!”

But now, Mozilla’s UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla’s Weave to make your online identity something that’s stored in your back pocket more than it’s stored in your cookies or a third party’s server.

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we’ve seen yet:

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site… Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Finally! They said it!

And now, we give you screenshots:

So, what’s the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome’s identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don’t want their personal traffic tracked?

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Open Microblogging Service Hires Former Creative Commons Strategist

An all-star team is forming at StatusNet, the open microblogging service for businesses and communities. The newest addition is Jon Phillips, former community and business development manager for Creative Commons.

Phillips joins Brion Vibber, who came from the Wikimedia Foundation where he served as chief technology officer.

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The news is significant as it reflects the interest in open-source alternatives to the proprietary microblogging services that currently dominate the market in the consumer and enterprise communities.

According to their web site, StatusNet makes sites that use open-source software to create and distribute open content. The company also provides professional support contracts and customization for companies that use StatusNet software on their own servers for intranet or Internet microblogging.

identi.ca, the open network micro-blogging service is based on the StatusNet tool.

Phillips and Vibber join a team led by Evan Promodou, the founder of StatusNet, whose previous work included creating the Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel.

Phillips, who is an avid microblogger (@rejon) writes on the StatusNet blog:

I’m super enthused about the direction Status.Net is heading as a free network service, as a business, and as a leader in software and culture with a focus locally on niche communities on scaling internationally (more on that soon). Right now, we are working very hard towards some big releases slightly under the radar with the push towards Status.net hosted services and Status.Net 1.0 software.

Phillips says he will help with some large projects Status.Net is building, including an upcoming relaunch. He will be there to help ease some of Evan’s work load so he can be freed up to be “uber-CEO rather than having to wear 50 different hats.”

According to the bio on his blog, Phillips worked from 2005 to 2008 building the community and business development strategy for Creative Commons. Phillips “worked with hundreds of businesses through Creative Commons 50+ international jurisdictions to integrate Creative Commons licensing, and managed globally successful projects such as ccSalons, the Case Studies, Metrics, and CC+ projects. He recently completed the special project, the Public Domain Wiki, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Access Copyright, and Internet Archive.

Pretty impressive.

We expect some major pushes from the open-source microblogging community. Phillips arrival is a sure sign that major efforts are underway to make StatusNet a leader in this realm.

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