Yahoo!’s OpenID service will be available in public beta on January 30th. Till than you can keep close look to http://openid.yahoo.com

And here you can play the game for yourself:

http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq

There are a few ways of online identification today, but more interesting is what`s coming on in the near future. Nowadays we have to make a lot of accounts for services we want to use or just to try. Most of you probably have experienced that on some places if you want to leave a comment you should register first. Due to this big mess with so many accounts most of the users prefer to use the same information (ex. passwords). Then what happens when he decides his account is no more secured, he goes and change his password all over the places he has registered? Now you see what is just one of the problems of nowadays online identification systems.

What should we expect for the future? Most of the biggest companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo) have already thought about the topic and have their decisions. The good thing is that the Open Source community has ideas, too.

Let`s first start with Microsoft. Only a few years ago Microsoft wanted to takeover the world with its .NET Passport (newly Windows Live ID) and to dominate in the field of Online Identity. Microsoft`s Passport was a single sign-on service valid only for Microsoft`s web sites and for some of its partners` sites. A lot of people thought .NET Passport was not well considered and therefore it didn’t become a turn stone for the Online Identity. But we have to agree that at that time only remarkable were the efforts of Microsoft`s Passport and then-new Liberty Alliance (who tried to create single sign-on not dominated by Microsoft). Microsoft took a further step and they will implement CardSpace in Windows Vista as a logical extension to .NET Passport. CardSpace (codename InfoCard) is built on WS-Trust and a number of Microsoft technologies. Microsoft does not control WS-* (at least not by itself) which is important. On the other hand, the adoption of this Identity technique will be driven by Windows Vista so Microsoft is the major driver here.

Google rapidly continues to work towards his goal to create an Online OS. Companies from its rank don’t tell what they will do. They do it and after that, they announce it. Google developed a lot of services and all of them using a single account. Firstly known as a Gmail account, but after words we talk about it as a “Google Account”. When they create their Online OS this would be the single sign-on of using it. No matter how open are Google towards Open Source Projects, I really doubt that they will agree to open their Identity system.

Yahoo on the other hand has developed Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth). They say: “BBAuth offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.” As a web developer you can take a part in this initiative and make the live easier for the thousands of users who come from Yahoo. But finally the Identity is owned and controlled by Yahoo (could be another company).

Now is the time to mention about OpenID. OpenID is a decentralized digital identity system, in which any user’s Online Identity is given by URL (such as for a blog or a home page) or an XRI in the latest version. On websites which supports OpenID users don’t need to create and manage new account. Instead, they only need to be able to authenticate with a trusted site that supports OpenID, called the identity provider (ex. VeriSign Labs, LiveJournal, MyOpenID and others). The user has the right to choose his identity provider. He is fully in control, over whether or not to have an identity or how many and over the attributes of the account. User-controlled identity at its heart was the realization that “we are the people”. That identity should comes from the people whose identity it is, rather from outside organizations — whether government or business. This is part of the social democratization of the network that seems unstoppable and very disruptive.

Johannes Ernst mentions that the best way dealing with Online Identity is making the technologies interoperable. It sounds great, only that it’s too ideal for me to believe it. Therefore my choice is to stick closer to OpenID. And I hope companies will realize and give more power to the users to control their Identity in a specified way of course.

The mail that I have sent:

——————————————–

from: Todor Georgiev

to: info(at)stamen.com

cc: cic.bulgaria@eu.sony.com

date: Dec 4, 2006 3:03 AM

subject: [Splatter and Sony advertisement] Sony Bulgaria is using Splatter art for advertisement …

——————————————–

Hello to both sides,

Maybe I have misunderstood what`s going on, but I hope you will tell me.Today (4 December 2006), I saw a flash banner on one of the Bulgarian
big online portals (gbg.bg) advertising Sony – Bravia.
The funniest thing is that the flash banner is pointing to the web
site – http://artlikenoother.com/I really hope this art was not stolen from Sony.

A little facts I have researched which lead me to write you this letter.

-1. ——————
Splatter: now available for download (http://stamen.com/projects/splatter)

Splatter is available under a liberal Creative Commons license.
Noncommercial distribution and reinterpretation is governed by the
Atttribution, Non-Commerical, Share-Alike 2.5 License. Commercial use
is allowed, provided you make a $1000 donation to the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. See the License text enclosed with the
downloadable files for details.
http://stamen.com/files/LICENSE.txt
———————–

-2. ——————
Miltos Manetas (http://manetas.com/) have tried to steal this work
(http://eric.stamen.com/2004/03/its-said-that-imitation-is-sincerest.html).
———————–

As far as I did not see anywhere in the advertisement that it was used
Splatter I am confused.
In the license it is mentioned “- Any of these conditions can be
waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.” I hope Sony
has this permissions. Is that truth?

Anyway I would like to receive e-mail from you soon for what`s going
on. Otherwise people would love to hear about the “Artlikenoother.com”

Greetings,

Todor Georgiev
(Sony fan, especially of the new reader. But still a human being who
admire the art of others.)

`Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term `Tampa hotels`, for example, and you will not get any useful results. Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: `this page is good, this page sucks.` Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

Google search engine uses an algorithm to evaluate the pages. One of the things with highest priority is that google algorithms calculates how many other websites are pointing to yours, which in turn gives the page rank of your web site.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, using free open-source software. Mr Wales idea is to use this network of `Wikipedians` and the same type of free software to create his search engine.

Jimmy Wales:

“The project to build the community to build the search engine is launching in the first quarter of 2007, not the search engine itself. We may have something up pretty quickly, maybe some sort of demo or test for people to start playing with. But we don’t want to build up expectations that people can come in three months and check out this Google-killing search engine that we’ve written from scratch. It’s not going to happen that fast.

What we want to do now is get the community going and get the transparent algorithms going so we can start the real work. It’s going to be a couple of years before this really turns into something interesting.”

You can find more information on the project page: Search Wikia

EPIC 2014 is a short film describing the near future of the global network and internet. The story is told in fascinating way and really make you believe in it. It doesn’t take part, but just predicting facts. In the near future it forecast the end of the news agencies. The news will be gathered from machines which obey on the people driven engine. In fact the news will be customized per user.

In one of the interviews “Change Media” of Richard Edelman (President & CEO of Edelman Advertising agency) he describes the new era in media distribution. Television is the fourth most preferred activity to teens behind surfing the web, talking to friends and going to cinema, wasn’t so five years ago. It was the most. He describes how newspapers are becoming more and more read in their online versions.

Now, you tell me. Do you believe in the near future you saw, or you have your own version?