How cool is that?

We’re thrilled to be honored with membership into Gartner’s “cool social technology” club (our words, not theirs) along with 140 Proof, Influitive, Woobox and Zuberance. The report’s focus is around the opportunity that exists for digital marketers in leveraging the social web to reach their online goals, and goes on to recommend these cool vendors for organizations to call upon.

Our motivation at Janrain isn’t necessarily to “be cool” but we think it’s pretty darn awesome to work with brands we all like, know and buy from such as Universal Music Group, Fox, Dr Pepper, Samsung, AMC, Guitar Center and Pac12. In our book, it’s our customers that we find pretty cool because they understand exactly what Gartner analyst Julie Hopkins means when she writes:

Janrain simplifies the process of managing multiple online identities to remove the “digital hassle” often associated with the user’s broad social participation.

In other words: our customers know that password fatigue is a real problem and leverage our social login technology to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of allowing their website visitors to quickly log in to their site.

So, while we’re humbled to be called a “cool vendor” and thank Gartner for the recognition, we really want to thank our customers who make us who we are by choosing Janrain in the first place and relying on us to earn their trust everyday.

Today we announced our series C funding, $33 million of new investment from four new firms and all of our current investors. We are humbled and honored by the trust our new partners have placed in us, and are equally grateful for the relationship we have had with our existing investors, all of whom have done much over the last several years to guide us to this point.

At Janrain we have been obsessed with authentication, identity, and profile management for many years. We’ve been fortunate to find a business model that allows us to continue to grow and invest in a deep, focused, best-of-breed platform approach solution. What was just a handful of software engineers five years ago is now a team of nearly 200 spread across functional roles and geography. We are on a continuous innovation and delivery cycle. And yet at the same time, our mission and thesis have remained unaltered for the past three years.

Our new investment round will allow us to continue to scale quickly yet responsibly, while also giving us the ability to make some decisions that will have longer term payback. All areas of the company will expand, but we will be making a disproportionate investment in customer success.

We find ourselves in front of a huge opportunity, with a great product, extremely well capitalized, staffed with 180 of the smartest and most pleasant people you’d want to work with across the globe and a great set of partners united to help us build the best company possible for our customers. Let’s go!

Recent Coverage:

• Forbes: Janrain Raises $33 Million To Supercharge Social Media
• TechCrunch: Janrain Raises $33M From Salesforce, And Others For Social Log-In Management Platform
• Oregonian: Janrain confirms $33 million venture round, plans to accelerate growth
• Fortune: Venture capital Deals
• CMSWire: Social Login Provider Janrain Raises New Round of $20 Million
• SocialNewsDaily:

  Janrain Raises $33 Million From Salesforce, Millennium Technology, And Others

• ClickZ: Janrain Raises $33M Series C Round
• socaltech.com: DFJ Frontier, Anthem Boost Janrain
• techrockies: EPIC Ventures Joins In JanRain Investment

The technology Janrain provides offers tremendous value to our clients as they are able to more easily and effectively convert anonymous site visitors into known, registered users while also gaining permission-based access to social profile data that can be used to create more compelling, relevant online experiences.  With that ability comes responsibility, however.

Our experience has shown that when our clients are transparent about what data they are collecting, why they are collecting it, and how the data will be used, consumers are much more willing to share personal information.  This is because they understand what they will get in return for providing access to the data.  A great example of this transparency can be seen on the Channel 4 website, in their Viewer Promise.

On our side, we need to provide consumers the ability to easily grant and revoke access to their personal data and ensure that this information is protected and treated with integrity.  We’ve always done so, and with Lewis’ help, promise to maintain and perhaps even improve our data protection assurance to you.

We have a number of initiatives underway that will reinforce our commitments in this area, so watch this space for upcoming announcements.  (And feel free to reach out to Lewis to congratulate him on his new role!)

1. Data structure intensive. The fundamental concept in social networking is the network. There are many ways to represent networks, including graphs, hypergraphs, and simplicial sets. Functional programming provides elegant ways to define and manipulate such libraries, and extensive libraries to assist the programmer in this area. Furthermore, both Haskell and Scala offer support for generic programming, wherein social network operations can often be defined once and reused for many relevant data structures.
2. Concurrency: The services must be able to process many requests in parallel, and processing each request requires many activities that may be done in parallel, such as accessing a database, and contacting social network service providers. As a request is processed, the server may access or construct data structures; for example the server may construct a network of friends and friends of friends from several service providers. Another example is the processing of OpenID discovery for social login. OpenID discovery involves a sequence of discovery steps to different endpoints on the web. Many of these steps can be carried out in parallel. Haskell offers lightweight threads in support of concurrent programming, while Scala offers actors in support of concurrency. Concurrency and data structures are easy to combine in either Haskell or Scala. A sample that forks a thread for each element of a list in Haskell is shown below. Similar combinators can be defined for graphs and other data structures.
3. High Availability: The services for the social network need to operate 24/7 in a highly available manner. Functional programming offers several features that support high availability. Scala has Finagle, which is an RPC system. Finagle can be used to implement availability concepts such as failover or m of n policies. Code should also be tolerant of errors. For example, in the code snippet below, each individual request could fail. The code returns a list of responses for those requests that succeed, and error codes for those that failed. The processing of the requests and responses will continue in spite of some failing requests. Thus the code snippet includes data structures, concurrency, and fault tolerance in just two lines of code.

– | Sample Haskell code that combines data structures and concurrency.
– | Do proxy HTTP over a list of requests
proxyHTTPs::HostPort                 – ^ The host/port of the dest
          -> [ Request B.ByteString ] – ^ HTTP Requests to send
          ->IO [ EitherSomeException ( ResponseB.ByteString ) ]
proxyHTTPs hp reqs = do
 – Perform each request in parallel.
 rsps  <- mapM ( proxyHTTPWrap hp ) reqs
 – Get the response data out of the MVars.
 mapM takeMVar rsps

At Janrain have found functional programming to be an important tool in support of social networking applications. We will continue to explore this valuable technology in support of social applications.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Kevin Long, Janrain Technical Product Manager, to introduce the new Janrain Engage social login widget and provide detail on how to use the new enhancements. Read other posts within the Janrain Technical series.

Previous posts covered the expanded support for mobile devices, new customization features, and performance. Today we’ll focus on using the client side javascript api and how to connect it to analytics engines.

The Event of the Season!

Analytics Integration with the Social Login Widget

Janrain Engage analytics provide a lot of insight and value with the hand dashboard trend graph, summaries and the click to drill in headings that reveal the details. If you are already tracking your website’s visitor traffic with an analytics tool like Google Analytics, or Omniture SiteCatalyst you will want to view the user login process right along side your existing analytics data.

The Janrain Engage social login widget’s client side JavaScript API fires events that you can listen to and trigger your own client side code. You can track these events using a product like Google Analytics or Omniture, or even your own in house analytics.

How to Track User Login Events

This is the third in a series of blog posts by Kevin Long, Janrain Technical Product Manager, to introduce the new Janrain Engage social login widget and provide detail on how to use the new enhancements. Read other posts within the Janrain Technical series.

Previous posts covered the expanded support for mobile devices and the new customization features. This time we focus on performance enhancements of the new Janrain Engage social login widget. Stay tuned for the final post where we will focus on the expanded Javascript API.

Accelerating the Accelerator

The Janrain Engage social login widget is used by millions of people on hundreds of thousands of web sites worldwide. Removing the barriers to engagement with your users by simplifying and accelerating sign-ups and sign-ins is the primary reason Janrain Engage is implemented.

Part of accelerating the authentication process is delivering the goods as quickly as possible so as to remain an invisible part of our customer’s site flow. As part of the release of our latest version of the Janrain Engage social login widget, we have implemented changes that take advantage of a variety of new tools, techniques and deployment methods to further expedite the authentication process. Our developer blog post and technical white paper detail these methods and outline performance benchmarking tests against both our legacy widget and that of the competition.

Results

Keeping with the theme of acceleration let’s jump right to the results of our performance testing. The new Janrain Engage social login widget tested:

• four times faster than our legacy widget, which was already faster than the competition
• five times faster than the closest competitor’s widget
• seven times as fast for global users in remote locations with poor connectivity

These are the average speed increases. Its not uncommon to see even better results using the new social login widget.

The Need for Speed

New Janrain Engage customers and implementations will have instant access to the enhanced social login widget through your Janrain Dashboard.  Existing customers’ implementations are retained from your previous settings and you won’t see any changes to your social login widget until you make them. When you’re ready, just review your settings and generate new JavaScript to cut and paste into your site. No server side changes to your token URL are required. Our Basic and Plus level customers interested in customizing the look and feel of your social login widget to the branding of your site are invited to contact us today about upgrading your license.

We’re pleased with the response to our advanced Janrain Engage Social Login Widget and the excitement its generating. Last time we covered the new style and layout features. This time we will focus on Mobile support. Please stay tuned for future posts on:

• Performance Enhancements
• Expanded Javascript API

Enhanced Mobile Support

Janrain products have features to help you support users of mobile devices. These features are automatically used by the widget when they are enabled on the mobile device.

One Size Does Not Fit All!
Screen Resolution on mobile devices varies wildly. While almost all have greater than the 160 pixel width of the first generation and most current devices are in the 320-480 pixel width range, tablets and newer high density displays bring new dimensions and unheard of DPIs that complicate the rendering of usable content.

A Touching Gesture
Touch screen devices enable a new mode of interaction called gestures.
These are primarily used to perform navigation tasks. There is not a consensus on which gestures represent which actions. There is also no universal agreement yet on browser event models.

What’s your Angle?
Mobile devices can be tilted and used in both horizontal/landscape mode and vertical/portrait mode. Users expect web apps to detect and resize and re-layout content dynamically based on each change in of orientation.

Now lets take a look at the features in the new Janrain Social Login Widget that address these needs.

New Janrain Engage Mobile Web Features

Mobile Web Browsers now include many features that are specific to the needs of mobile. There are a few core features that are well supported by most mobile web browsers and are applicable to authenticating on the mobile web.

Dynamic Zoom
Zooming may be triggered by double tapping or unpinching depending on your browser/device.

Horizontal Layout
Tilting/rotating your device will automatically triggered a horizontal layout on most devices.

Swipe Gestures
Swipe gestures are the touch equivalent of scroll bars or classic page-up/page-down keys.
Janrain Engage can be configured to display more than one page of login buttons to reduce the cluttered “nascar effect” of having too many logos while still providing a variety of options to support a diverse population.

Swipe is automatically enabled by Janrain when available on the device. Swipe by touching and dragging to reveal additional providers.

Going Native?
Sometimes mobile applications need a tighter integration than can be provided through a pure web based application. Native applications can perform better, feel more familiar and may have access to device features that are not available from the web browser sandbox.

This new web widget functionality is made available in addition to the Native Mobile App development for social login and sharing we provide both a Library for Apple’s iOS and for Library for Google’s Android native development platforms.

Conculsion

These features are all applied automatically if the user has the features available on their mobile browser and device and have them enabled in their settings.

If you have not yet implemented Janrain Engage on your site you can discover the Benefits of Janrain Engage and learn about Implementing Janrain Engage.

Here are some links to device settings information and alternative mobile browsers that may provide more support than the stock browser that shipped with your device.

Browsers

• Opera
• Dolphin
• Steel
• xScope

Settings

• iPhone
• Android

Additional Reading

• O’Reilly’s Mobile Design & Development – The Device Matrix 
• User Experience Coding How-To’s for Safari on iPhone

I had the pleasure of spending some time at Janrain last month. As a member of the original Glasgow Haskell compiler team back in the early 90′s, I was curious to see how Haskell is used to support robust engineering, as well as scope future opportunities in industry for students graduating from my functional programming classes at KU.

I was impressed with what I saw at Janrain. There is a strong engineering core inside Janrain successfully deploying Haskell, and solving real-world issues like identity management. The engineering challenges are being met using the standard Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and mainstream Haskell libraries. Inside the company, engineering best practices and custom tools are supporting the development of local modifications to Haskell libraries, and the company is also active in the open source community.

All round, it is a win for everyone. I will be recommending that my students look at Janrain (and living in Portland) as a way of continuing work with Haskell.

It is great to see Haskell reach critical mass and mainstream adoption. The Glasgow Haskell compiler was recently awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award, and the compiler continues to be used both for application development and cutting-edge research.

Thanks for a fun day, Janrain.

Andrew Gill
Functional Programming at KU

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Janrain Engage Social Login Widget this month. The release includes multiple customization capabilities easily accessed from your dashboard, performance enhancements and additional support for mobile products. Today will focus on the new style and layout options available to you, but stay tuned for future posts on:

• Performance Enhancements
• Enhanced Mobile Support
• Expanded Javascript API

Style and Substance

The familiar Janrain Engage Social Login widget is a comforting sign that welcomes visitors to a site and delivers a promise of a frictionless sign-up, login, and return experience, but sometimes one size does not fit all. What if you want to develop your own unique brand experience that expresses your site’s identity and unique audience? It’s always been possible, but now it’s so easy, that it’s fun.

Defining Your Style

If you don’t already have a style guide for your site now would be a great time to get started. It should not be a long document with rules and regulations, but rather a concise guide to the facts of life of designing for your site. It should include the things anyone designing new content for your site needs to know to fit in and get along. At the minimum it should include the dimensions of your content areas, along with your palette of colors and selected fonts so that you can maintain your brand identity as your site grows.

A Simple Style Guide for Example.com:
Dimensions:
The example site column Layout with a header and footer.
Site width is 960px wide.
Header and footer are the full width but only 100px tall.
Columns on both sides are 180px wide.
All areas have 10px margin top and bottom and 20px margin left and right.
Colors:
Header and Footer and Sidebar Background: #333 – Charcoal;
Accent Foreground:
Content Background: #EEE – Off White
Content Foreground: #999 – Dark Grey
Fonts:
All: Sans Serif – 10px

From this you can see where you might put the widget and can calculate the dimensions required. A diagram would be nice but this will do for now.

Layout

You could embed the full size widget in its default glory, center of the content area, but that seems a little heavy handed. You could place just a login link in the upper right to launch a modal pop up window, but that adds an extra click and doesn’t clue the user in to the fact that they will have the ease of social login. You decide that the best of both worlds would be to embed the widget into the upper right section of the header.

Do the math to see how to fit your widget: the height should be the header height minus the top and bottom margin (100px-10px-10px = 80px), and the width should line up with the column width below to keep things orderly (180px-10px-10px = 160px). That’s enough room for 3-4 icons or two columns of good-sized buttons. If you know that nine out of ten visitors to your site use Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, put those up front and allow the user to see more when they click the next page button.

Select:
Type: Embedded
Layout: Two Column Layout

Drag the handle to adjust the width slider:
Width: 160px
Providers Per Page: 4
Action Text: None

Providers

If providers aren’t already configured, it’s easy to do by clicking the gear icon next to each provider and following along with the wizard steps. Drag and drop them onto the multi-page version of the widget layout.

Style

This is where you can set the background color according to your style guide by clicking on the color swatch to invoke the color picker or by entering the RGB hex codes directly. Select your font, and adjust the button style to be square, very round or in-between to match your site’s general style. The widget preview is automatically updated as changes are made.

When you’re satisfied with the look, proceed by clicking the Save button to apply changes. Another option is to select the Embed option instead of Save and click the Generate Code button to proceed to the next tab to cut and paste code that designers can easily modify later to tweak the configuration right on the site without returning to the dashboard.

Trying It Yourself

Both the traditional widget and the new widget are available. To have access to the new widget, please contact your account representative or Janrain technical support.

In this post, we’ve covered how to adjust the layout and style of the new Janrain Engage Social Login Widget. Next week, we’ll cover performance enhancements and some fine tuning tips to facilitate user engagement on your site.

If you have comments or suggestions about the product or its new features please contact me at Kevin(at)Janrain(dot)com

In 2008 we saw Yahoo & Google become OP’s, joining AOL in enabling their massive user base to use their existing account as an OpenID. MySpace and Microsoft have announce that they will also OpenID enable their user base in 2009. We are approaching a point where a website can assume their end-user probably has an OpenID. In late 2008, we introduced RPX, which greatly reduces the engineering required to take OpenID. Watch out internet, (Billions of users) + (Easy way for them to register and login)!