09 Mar 2007
Wow… the timing is so bizarre I can barely believe it.
I stumbled across this post announcing support for OpenID on the Pixelsoup blog of JadedPixel, makers of Shopify. I’m not entirely convinced this even makes sense here, but whatever — it’s fascinating.
On the plus side, Shopify appeared to have disappeared off the face of the planet (in terms of stagnation) for a couple of months there, but their blog at least is alive and kicking. Certainly not for consumption by tomorrow’s audience, but potentially good for some e-commerce applications.
There is no WordPress of online shop software, which is slightly irritating. A great opportunity for a very high profile open source project: take OsCommerce and make it user-friendly and generally not-crappily-interfaced right out of the box! WordPress has done a few innovative feature things, but I reckon most of its success has been built on the grounds that it’s free software (heck, it wouldn’t exist if it couldn’t have forked B2) and the work they’ve poured into the interface.
I’m posting too much geeky stuff. Something non-geeky to come soon, I hope.
09 Mar 2007
I’ve mentioned OpenID here and here before (the first only in passing), in the context of fragmenting social networks and LiveJournal. By the way, check out the second of those posts… for meta-writing/meta-blogging, it’s (IMO) surprisingly good! I was pleased.
Anyway — OpenID is still around 10 months later (though the spec was last updated around the time I last wrote on the matter), WordPress.com have announced they are now an IdP for it, and it seems everyone wants to be a provider, not a consumer (in OID spec parlance, consumer means the website requesting verification of an Identity — “end user” is the term given to an actual human user).
In fact, Ma.gnolia.com is the only OpenID consuming site of consequence that I’ve encountered thus far in my travels. Which is, to say the least, slightly perplexing.
I’m aware the whole point of OpenID is that it’s a vastly decentralised spec that enables myriad providers to exist, but it seems somewhat redundant (in the sense in which that means “pointless, without purpose”, not failover-type redundancy) if there does not exist a single consumer of consequence!
And, let’s face it, why should being a consumer be attractive? You know less about your customers, they can bail on you more quickly, and… all of a sudden, advertising is the only way of monetising a website. JanRain operate “MyOpenID: Your first (and last) identity provider”, as well as a couple of services that use OpenID, and have (to my eyes, at least) no conceivable way of generating revenue at present.
Which is potentially fine, but completely stupid if that’s happening on a wider scale. As a concept, OpenID has much to offer — I just wouldn’t use it in CYIADA. I might consider it for smaller projects (commercial clients), but, really, I think it’d have a better chance if Myspace were an OpenID provider. And we all know what they’re like when it comes to web standards (and general usability issues)!
Plus, of course, there’s the issue of the popularity of up-stream providers if you want to verify against something other than OpenID (like, for example, someone’s Google account — which you can do quite easily using various API tools they provide). With anything youth targeted, there’s a special impetus that we don’t really see in other places. I read this absolutely hilarious comment on a great analysis of an article about Myspace:
It’s easy to imagine teenagers as a pack of wildebeests on a grassy plain, simply running with wild abandon.
Why yes, yes it is. They’re not (article has more on this), but the bottom line is if you’re using external verification services, you’re dependent on the existence and longevity of these services for the existence and longevity of your services, not the least in user profiling and building up meaningful market data so you can adjust your mix to a known audience.
You don’t have the same degree of control over these things, and there’s a trust relationship there beyond just the security/phishing issues side of things, that most businesses don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. With good reason.
OpenID feels like a wonderful technology in a chicken-egg situation. It’s still just too bloody geeky for your average LJ user to get on board with. And they’ve got it easy. For anyone else, it’s completely impossible.
Here in Sydney, we could probably get away setting up verification against Windows Live simply because that’s what people use here, as I have noted before (about halfway down the post linked). But developing different authorisation schemes as a matter of localisation is most definitely not in my book of best practices (if I were ever to write one :P) — so, instead, fragmented Internet identities persist.
That bugs me.
If you have any answers or thoughts… let me know. Blog about it and send a pingback/trackback. That’s one of the few open standards that’s worked well on the web, albeit with plenty of spam abuse, but there’s of course the problem that not enough people are socially blogging aside from software developers and design geeks and… whatever category I fit into (“web strategist” is still what I’m calling myself… we’ll see how much longer that sticks) — so, of course, there’s no instinct to reply in this manner.
In the same way, developer and business instinct is to build your own authentication and profiling platform. Is it worth resisting?
08 Mar 2007
Okay, so maybe I spoke too soon.
Its interface is wonderfully improved, its typesetting now is vastly more tolerable, and it’s still full of bugs.
I just tried to print a document and it failed to include one image out of thirteen. I tried to print to a PDF file (using Acrobat, because the inbuilt PDF plugin is crap and won’t respect the Word multiple sheets/page setting), in case it was just the printer being lame — it wasn’t.
Who thought it might be a good idea to release a word processor that can’t print?
Obviously they scrapped their beta testing programme so they could afford to give it away for $75 to people who’d otherwise pirate it anyway *rolls eyes*
07 Mar 2007
Please stop me if I am making a fool of myself by overflowing with gushing praise for this thing, but, seriously, the best $75 I ever spent on software. (Yes, you can get the latest Office Ultimate for $75 if you’re a student. Legit.)
The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.
I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:
Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):
The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:
It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.
Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.
Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.
Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!
07 Mar 2007
I have a clash in my uni timetable. That’s okay. But it would aid my decision making process in what subject I am planning to avoid immensely if bloody academics understood the meanings of words they encounter and use daily.
According to the OED:
lecture, n.
- a. A discourse given before an audience upon a given subject, usually for the purpose of instruction.
How then, I ask, is it acceptable to label a given teaching time an “interactive lecture” wherein the principal activity constitutes what would, in common parlance, be termed “group work”? Call if a symposium or something else equally wanky and pretentious if you can’t bring yourselves to call a spade a spade and perhaps simply call it a seminar, but for goodness sake — avoid bastardising terms where the nature of their delivery and method is clearly understood to be something else entirely!
This is not the fault of the English department, by the way. The subject in question is run by the fartily named “Digital Cultures” school. I do not esteem them very highly thus far… the subject seems like a bit of a waste of time, but hopefully it’ll be good for networking with a handful of other people in the course who also feel they’re having their time wasted, and then we can subvert the department from within by allowing actual web practice to influence these (probably self-proclaimed futurist) lecturers in courses they don’t really understand.
I paid $17 for a photocopied course reader full of articles from before Bubble 1.0 burst. Recommended reading for “Web 2.0″ (yes, they dared use that word) consists of Wikipedia and articles in Time magazine. Yes, I feel as violated as you do. This seems like an area of tertiary education that is particularly lost in its own muddled up language and self-congratulatory conferences and publications that it has not the foggiest idea what real people are doing with the web. Or, alternatively, if that’s not the case, there seems to be an awful lot of catch-up work required on the pedagogy front: the reader facilitates some kind of pseudo-sociological exploration of ‘the web’ as an entity, but somehow manages to seem completely irrelevant to actual practice.
What on earth is a Digital Cultures major equipping people for? Not engagement with online media! An ability to discern a quality Wikipedia article, and a cultivated taste for articles in Time, and, perhaps, at best, an ability to read particularly head-up-ass style journals addressing issues that are so bound up in recent anachronism that it can’t even be deemed an historically valuable specialisation?
Okay I’m [nearly] done. I’m going to stick around in the course because students were having some really interesting discussions fairly independently of the lecturer’s [sic] direction today, and because there are some people that sound like they have some idea what they’re talking about. Of course, there’s always one mature age male trying to convince people to join him in developing some web 2.0 social networking business case, but one in a course of sixty isn’t too bad. Grumble grumble. He’s probably back at uni after having sent some poor business bankrupt.
I can see this having the potential to be like a real-world overly-opinionated discussion forum, but that’ll probably be fun for a semester. My opinions reserve the right to change dramatically over the coming weeks — I write this from only two hours of reading and an hour of “lecture”.
Really, I feel better now :)