Archive for February, 2007

NOTICE: This service interruption is now complete, and MyOpenID service is back online. Please contact us if you have any comments or questions. More →

I did a talk at Ignite Seattle last week and it was a total blast. I love the 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide format. The scary thing about this is that I was able to get everything across that I wanted to in just 5 minutes. Why on earth have I ever needed an hour to give a talk?! :-)

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You can view the video here.

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We are ecstatic to be selected by Business 2.0 for their Next Net 25 list of companies to watch in 2007. More →

Wow! What a morning! The news is out that we just got selected for this year’s Business 2.0 Next Net 25 list.

This year we’re in there with the likes of Meebo (love this app), Joost, StumbleUpon and Wikia (Jimmy Wales wiki startup). Last years selections included Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot and Writely … oh, and of course YouTube … :-)

We’re really honored and the whole crew here at JanRain is just ecstatic. The best is yet to come.

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Very exciting news from the Future of Web Apps conference going on in London right now. Digg will support OpenID.

Lots of coverage already:

• GigaOm: Digg to Support OpenID
• Vecosys: Digg will support OpenID
• TechCrunch: Kevin Rose at FOWA Digg Adopts OpenID

So what does this mean? It means that OpenID is happening. This in addition to the recent trends is another indication that OpenID is here to stay.

Do you want to get up and running with OpenID quickly? Head over to OpenIDEnabled.com and read about delegation, find the libraries you need to enable your projects and sites and just learn more about OpenID as a whole.

Are you interested in getting users of your site OpenID’s? Check out the MyOpenID affiliate program. We also have a site API that allows you to create new API’s for your own users and domain name that is managed by MyOpenID. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at all!

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Its been an amazing couple of weeks for the OpenID community. Microsoft and AOL have announced support of OpenID. AOL’s 63 million users and Six Apart’s 16 million users are all OpenID enabled. More sites are coming on-line that support OpenID: Jyte, Zooomr and Ma.gnolia all allow you to login with it.

We at JanRain have been working hard to deliver new services like Jyte (check out Jyte Spy!) as well as continue to develop the MyOpenID site into the premier OpenID provider with new anti-phishing and convenience features just added. More features are on the way!

The 52,000+ MyOpenID users have logged into over 1200 unique sites that support OpenID (see the graph). A lot of these users are coming via our affiliate program and site API that each allow web sites to integrate OpenID creation into their sign-up process. We’ve found that a lot of sites just want to use OpenID, not manage identities. These programs are perfect for you if you just want to focus on your “main thing”. The partnership with GNR on their FreeYourID service uses this new site API.

Avery Glasser has just published a report that details the usage patterns that Ma.gnolia (social bookmarking site) has seen from users that are using OpenID on their site. Ma.gnolia adopted OpenID in mid-December along with supporting their existing login system. The gist is that its all good news. OpenID users are more engaged and much stickier to the site and this is real data speaking to what we’ve been saying for months.

How can you get involved? Easy. Get an OpenID for starters. Try logging into one of the many sites that support and see for yourself just how great the web can be with one username and password. OpenID enable your project or site … head over to OpenIDEnabled.com and find the libraries, tools and test suites you need to do so. Finally, (last but not least), join the OpenID community. Head over to openid.net and join the mailing lists, participate in the wiki and help continue OpenID’s amazing success.

What’s coming next? The applications. We see new sites coming on-line all the time (about 10 - 15 new OpenID enabled sites everyday) and they are really amazing. OpenID is more than just getting closer to the one username, one password solution … this is much bigger than that. OpenID is going to bring in a new age of connectedness and interoperability that we just haven’t been able to conceive of before. Social networking, communications, reputation and trust will all be significantly impacted by OpenID in the coming years and the best applications are yet to come.

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What a great time I had at Ignite Seattle last week. Its a geek-heavy event that couples making cool things as well as speed rounds for talks. In all, 22 people spoke (each for 5 minutes; 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) with about 400 people in attendance when all was said and done.

I was lucky enough to be one of the earlier speakers and I got to talk about OpenID (can you believe it?!). It was really cool when Brady introduced me and so many people applauded and ooh’d and aah’d when he mentioned I was going to talk about OpenID. Some folks have put up my slides and even talked about my talk. Very cool (and yet quite surreal).

My favorite picture that I found was this one that really shows the enormity of the event … very cool! Yep, that’s me up there talking about how OpenID is sweeping the nation! Thanks Brady and the rest of the Ignite Seattle crew for having me!

Videos are on the way and will be here when they get uploaded. I’ll post an update to this when its up.

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Some changes to MyOpenID today. More →

This from the I’m-the-last-one-to-report department … :-)

John Panzer of AOL announced this morning that AOL is now supporting OpenID for all of their users. This means if you have an AOL account/screenname you can now use it as an OpenID. From the article:

• Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/screenname.
• This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
• We’re working with OpenID relying parties to resolve compatibility issues.
• Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier. (No Yadis yet.)
• We don’t yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we’re actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
• We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.

Great work John and the rest of the AOL gang! This is fantastic news and I know the OpenID community couldn’t be more excited!

Now, all you AOL users, head over to Jyte and start making some claims! :-)

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We’re excited to announce our latest partnership with GNR (the folks who manage the .name registry) to help bring OpenID’s to the .name users everywhere. Now with just a few seconds you can register your very own .name domain name and get email, an OpenID and a whole lot more.

You can sign up today at FreeYourID.com. JanRain is providing the back-end OpenID services for the .name registry to handle the use of your .name as an OpenID. The registration is free for the first 90 days and then $10.95 US per year after that.

Many people have asked us if we could help manage the entire process of domain name registration and management of their OpenID and until now, we haven’t been able to do it. Fortunately, the GNR folks have made this super easy with their FreeYourID.com service and we’re excited to be helping them by providing the OpenID’s. We’re using OpenID delegation and our new site API on MyOpenID to make this happen.

For example, you can head over to FreeYourID.com and enter in a name like Larry Jones and you’ll then be presented with a series of options like larry.jones.name or lj.jones.name or lawrence.jones.name. You then get an email address of larry@jones.name, etc. Best of all, you can point your personal identity page anywhere you want. If you have a blog at username.livejournal.com, you can point your new .name at that and have it redirect there. You can even point at your own Jyte profile page to show off your claims, cred and contacts like I’ve done with scott.kveton.name … :-)

As always, any questions, comments or concerns, feel free to post them here! And go sign-up for your .name! :-)

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