Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 18th May 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
This is BIG. Facebook has now officially become an OpenID partner.
This means new Facebook users and existing ones can join and login using their Gmail accounts or any other OpenID provider.
If you’re an existing member, you can link your account with a Google, Yahoo, MySpace, or OpenID account by visiting your Account Settings page, selecting ‘linked accounts’ and selecting the provider of your choice.
“Existing and new users can now link their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from those OpenID providers that support automatic login. Once a user links his or her account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook.”
Unfortunately, I’m have issues with this aspect of the integration as well as linking my myopenid.com account, however, the fact that Facebook has finally made the move leaves nothing but a smile on my face – bugs will be fixed.
InsideFacebook broke the news and has an in depth interview with Facebook engineer and OpenID Foundation board member Luke Shepard, I highly recommend you read.
The most interesting aspect to all this is Facebook officially becomes the largest OpenID party on the web.
Written on 27th November 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Bloggingpro reports that Six Apart has launched a beta version of Typepad Connect: a service that blends in services which are separately provided by MyBLogLog, CoComment, Disqus, Gravatar and a couple of others. Its main goal: connecting bloggers and firming the position of the blog as a platform for your online social activity.
The latter seems to be the trend the last couple of months. First signaled in December 2007 by Chris Messina, who thinks of Wordpress as the next social network, and recently reaffirmed by Chris Brogan – who mentions the blog as the starting point for anyone who wants to build an online presence.
This whole blog-as-a-platform approach creates some challenges. For example, how do you connect with your friends? By using a spiced up blogroll?
No wonder that many services try to become THE standard for interactivity between blogs. All the big players are working on initiatives that might look very different, but have the same goal in the end.
AutoMattic works on BuddyPress. Yahoo! tries to boost MyBlogLog. CoComment partners up with Retaggr. Zemanta recently added a social layer. Google attacked MyBlogLog with a similar service in September.
And now there’s Typepad. Of course. I’d do the same if I were a big blogger player. Its mother company Six Apart describes Typepad Connect as follows: makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.” Oh and here’s the interesting bit: the well-designed service is available for all of the major blog platforms.
Welcome in the arena, Typepad.
Written on 12th November 2008
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
According to Fast Company these are the most influential women in Web 2.0. From left to right: Leah Culver (Pownce), Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare), Dina Kaplin (blip.tv), Marissa Mayer (Google), Cyan Banister (Zivity), Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page (BlogHer), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Kaliya Hamlin (OpenID), Mena Trott (Six Apart) and Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post).
The article is definitely worth reading and explains “What she’s done”, “How she got there” and “What to learn from her” for every woman on the list. It is hard to measure influence of course but there is no doubt these are the 13 most ‘famous’ female online entrepreneurs.
Who do you think is worth their title most? Who is REALLY the most influential? Let us know:
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Written on 4th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The reason I like Yahoo is that they have the guts to try new stuff. From the adoption of OpenID to challenging Digg, the Sunnyvale-based company keeps experimenting. The tricky part of that strategy is that not all projects succeed. As from December 3rd, Yahoo Live can be added to that list.
Its like you are breaking my heart with this news. I have been able to see my family every day because Y Live has made that possible not only for mr but for the rest of the guys here in Iraq. Please wait until we get home.
.. says jERRY jARVIS in the comments on the blog post that announces Yahoo Live’s way to the deadpool. 74 other users took the effort to sign a petition for the survival of Yahoo Live. Frankly, that number isn’t very spectacular, so I guess these folks will now have to move to services like BlogTV or Ustream to broadcast their adventures.
Yahoo Live launched and crashed (due to data overload) in February 2008. NewTeeVee reports that the streaming service only had 1,280 people watching 47 channels. This isn’t much, compared to their successful competitors. Our editor Ayelet Noff recently wrote about BlogTV, which has 20,000 different users broadcasting their own unique shows. No wonder Yahoo pulled the plug…
Written on 30th October 2008
12 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Google is growing up. As they do they seem to abandon their “Don’t be evil.” motto and adopt Microsoft’s “Embrace, extend and extinguish” strategies. Yesterday they announced, only two days after Microsoft, that they were officially supporting the popular OpenID standard. Many blogs applauded this move as OpenID is a great standard that needs all the support it can get.
Unfortunately what Google has launched has only partially to do with OpenID. It sorta looks and feels like OpenID but when you look at it actually works you will see that this is a proprietary technology built and owned by Google that providers will have to implement besides OpenID.
Not exactly helpful to the OpenID movement.
As explained here:
Basically, Google has rewritten OpenID. Not only is it not exactly the same as the current OpenID protocol, it’s so different that existing OpenID relying parties won’t be able to use it. Only a handful of “partner sites” have been updated to understand Google’s perverted version of the OpenID standard, and anyone else hoping to authenticate via “OpenID” to Google’s servers will need to do the same.
Google’s implementation of OpenID seems to be incompatible with everyone else. Of course Google is big and might very well persuade lots of web services to drop OpenID support and simply go for The Google Solution.
Dick Hardt, an important OpenID supporter, also confirms that Google is NOT compatible with OpenID:
“Well, just tried using Google and checked on the OpenID mailing list and they are NOT compliant. You have to type in http://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id if you want to use Google on an RP that has not implemented Google’s magic extensions. Very disappointing.
Bad Google. Bad and evil Google…
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UPDATE: it seems that the day after this post Google updated their services to become 100% OpenID compatible. Pretty cool! Thanks for the tip David Recordon!
Written on 3rd September 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) is on a roll. After its recent €50,000 investment in VIDDIX, DCIF has now invested in online identity tool RealMee. The amount of funding is undisclosed, but the Dutch fund usually backs start-ups with a €20,000 to €40,000 money stack. RealMee helps people to manage their online identity by creating a profile which will show up in Google’s top results when searching for one’s name.
When I interviewed founders Roland Carpentier and Hans Helms in February, they assured me that no tricks like cloacking and linkfarming were used to push RealMee pages up in the search results. An important part of their strategy is urging users to link to their RealMee profile from social network profiles.
The service isn’t interesting for people who’ve already built a significant web presence. But ordinary people who haven’t created any web content, will gladly welcome RealMee. Moreover, the service will soon learn these folks how to take advantage of the upcoming open standards – since RealMee will start providing OpenID services. They will also suggest users new web applications (there’s your business model).
So far, RealMee has 3000 users. That isn’t impressive number, so it won’t be surprising to hear that Carpentier and Helms will use the financial injection to attract new users. I’m pretty sure they’ll ask DCIF partners Telegraaf Media Groep and Ilse Media – large media companies – to help them gaining some traction.
Written on 23rd June 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the little OpenID incident at Next08 in May? I promised Andreas Stephan from Six Groups that I would blog about his service, if he would make OpenID support his top priority. Well, so it happened, and on June 6th, Six Group integrated OpenID login. Apparently, that has inspired another big German start-up as well, since Oliver Moser from Jimdo mailed me that his service also supports OpenID now.
Jimdo is an online Ajax-based website builder, which makes it easy for basically anyone to create a slick-looking page – sort of like an online iWeb. Their list of widgets is impressive, and Alexa tells us the service has been steadily growing. Here’s what Oliver has sent me:
From today on we’re supporting OpenID – but not as a provider, just as a host. Jimdo-users can now sign into their Jimdo-Page with their OpenID. But more important, they can use their personal Jimdo-Domain as an OpenID, even though Jimdo is not the provider. So if they comment on a blog post they can use their own domain – which of course makes a lot of sense.
You may wonder why Jimdo doesn’t act like a provider. Oliver has an answer to that question too: “There are already so many of then, so there’s no need for Jimdo being an additional one. And since OpenID enables Dataportability, we can actually make great use of it.”
Last week, some people at Supernova said OpenID and Dataportability have just become press releases machines. I can see why they say that, but I also think that it doesn’t hurt anyone (apart from our email inbox) since more and people will get familiar with the idea of open data. Also the less web-savvy ones, like most of the Jimdo users.
Written on 18th June 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Open Flow Track sessions at Supernova 2008 just beg for a flood of buzzwords. You can’t avoid them when you’re discussing topics like Social Graph’s, Network business models and Bottom-up distribution Openness. Words like “collaborative”, “engage”, “social networks”, and “OpenID” keep flying around in Room 4 of the Wharton West.
That didn’t go unnoticed by the moderator of the Bottom-up distribution Openness panel Jeremy Keith (Adactio), so he decided to give a funny twist with a customized Buzzword Bingo page.
Leah Culver (Pownce), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), David Recordon (Six Apart), and Tantek Celik thought of it as very funny and happily played along – although Leah didn’t immediately realized that every attendee had a different card. After Keith reminded her in a witty way that having different cards is quite vital for playing the game, he explained that you can refresh the page as many times as you want. He has even built a buzzword generator.
Fun way to spice up a panel! (a phenomenon I still hate though)
Written on 12th March 2008
5 COMMENTS
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Last night ClickPass has launched. ClickPass is a single-click-signon service that works on top of OpenID. The extra service that ClickPass offers is that you don’t have to remember your OpenID account, Clickpass does that for you. ClickPass is a Y Combinator start-up, which probably explains why some of the other Y startups already support their service.
You can use ClickPass to combine your logins for the services you use, like LiveJournal and WordPress. For each service ClickPass generates a new account which connects to the services account.
ClickPass is not without controversies, it makes use of the OpenID standard but adds a new ‘user discovery service’ on top of it. That service is not based on a standard. OpenID advocates would have liked to see ClickPass adopt a discovery standard like ‘SAML idp discovery’. ClickPass has not reacted on that. This issue will probably soon be addressed since OpenID’s chairmember, Scott Kveton, is also a member of the ClickPass board.
Besides not adopting standards ClickPass has some other downsides. (more…)
Written on 7th February 2008
4 COMMENTS
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.
Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.
In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
