Decentralized Social Networks and Portable Contacts

Decentralized
Social Networks

David Recordon May 21, 2009
WebVisions Portland, OR

Open Source

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jagelado/16631508/

http://www.illustratorworld.com/artwork/2238/

“Open Data is increasingly
important as services
move online.”
—Tim O'Reilly (OSCON '07)

data inside!

quot;It's like flying on an iPhone!quot;
http://flickr.com/photos/sathishcj/1868113345/

Social Applications

• Each with a few great features
(UNIX philosophy)
• Creating combined value
• Building blocks for new value
• No social graph of their own!

http://www.slideshare.net/stoweboyd/building-social-applications

Social Applications

OpenSocial

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2545757754/

Viewing

Virtuous Cycle of Sharing

Sharing

Anatomy of “Connect”

• Profile (identity, accounts, profiles)
• Relationships (followers, friends, contacts)
• Content (posts, photos, videos, links)
• Activity (poked, bought, shared, blogged)
• Goal: Discovery of people and content

Portable Contacts

About
The vision for Portable Contacts has been around for a long time. Sites large and
small share the goal of providing users a secure way to access their address books
and friends lists without having to take their credentials or scrape their data. But
only in recent weeks has it begun to feel that now is the right time to rally the
community and the industry to work together to make this vision real by
developing an open spec for exchange of contact info that everyone can embrace.

Why now?
The momentum began building for 'data portability' last year, and we are now at a
point where there is strong support for the principle that users should be in
control of their data and have the freedom to access it from across the web. And
the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with
secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users'
credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet
companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API,
Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come).
Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe
this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that
everyone can benefit from. Just as OAuth has provided a standard to unify the
various proprietary schemes for delegated authorization, we believe we can do the
same thing for securely sharing address book and friends list data.

Goals
The goal of Portable Contacts is to make it easier for developers to give their users
a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all
over the web. Specifically, we seek to create:

A common access pattern and contact schema that any site can provide
activity strea.ms
Well-specified authentication and access rules
Standard libraries that can work with any site Discuss.
and absolutely minimal complexity, with the lightest possible toolchain
An initiative from the DiSo Project.
requirements for developers.
First draft specs: Activities in Atom; Activity Schema.
A measure of our success will be the elimination of the quot;password anti-pattern,quot; by
making it far easier to implement Portable Contacts than to engage in scraping, as
well as a dramatic increase in the number of sites that both provide and consume
who-you-know data.

Our Approach
Our design is focused around ease of adoption, which means a few things. First,
our emphasis is on simplicity of design and targeted use cases. For example,
version 1 is simply about access, and defers for now on the more complex issues
around update and sync. Second, we're taking a modern approach to who-you-
know data by unifying traditional contact info and social network data, in order to
properly represent the current diversity of the social web ecosystem. Third, we're
using existing standards wherever possible, including vCard, OpenSocial, XRDS-
Simple, OAuth, etc. And lastly, we're designing something that should be easy for
current service providers to adopt. We started by reviewing all the major existing
contacts APIs and targeting the capabilities that they all share and provide. We
believe this pragmatic balance is the best and quickest way to achieve our shared
goal of widespread adoption.

Here is the current draft spec, the wiki, and the mailing list.

This project is being undertaken by Joseph Smarr, Chris Messina, and others.

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Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Dell Business Computers
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Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as quot;Facebook www.PcErrorCleaner.com
on sites all around the web,quot; enters general availability today and we've got
New Zealand Site
one big question - should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to Features 130,000 Members. Discover Why It's So Popular!
www.smilecity.co.nz
authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will
the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe Rss 2.0
RSS Readers for Individuals & Businesses. Get A Free
new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity? RSS Reader.
NewsGator.com/RSS_Readers
Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn't just about desktop software anymore - now it's about
our identities and social connections, all around the web. We've published a mind map below
displaying our understanding of the contrasts between these two identity systems. If you'd like to RWW SPONSORS

add our thoughts to that map, you can.

This battle isn't about quot;single sign-onquot; - it's about the payload that comes with it (friend networks,
personal data, maybe more), it's about the developer communities, usability and ownership. It's
very important to the future of our user experience online and it's a fascinating study in contrasts.

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Facebook Connect and OpenID Relationship
Status: “It’s Complicated”
by Guest Author on October 22, 2008 47 Comments

Editor’s Note: This post was contributed by John McCrea, VP of marketing for Plaxo, which is at
the vanguard of the data portability movement. He also blogs at The Real McCrea and does a
weekly video podcast about “opening up the Social Web” together with Joseph Smarr, David
Recordon, and Chris Messina at The Social Web TV.

As some of you know, I am a strong advocate of
an evolution from the “walled garden” model of
social networking toward an open Social Web,
characterized by interoperability and data portability. Along the way, I have been both a
cheerleader for all of the building blocks of the new “open stack” (including OpenID, OAuth, XRDS-
Simple, microformats, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial) and one of the most vocal critics of
Facebook. Over the past two years, I have never missed a chance to point out Facebook’s absence
from any key event or announcement around the “open” movement. And I’ve tried many different
techniques to encourage Facebook down the open path, some more controversial than others.

But I had an “aha moment” on Monday of this week at a rather historic event that could only
happen in Silicon Valley – a User Experience (UX) Summit for OpenID which brought together
Actively Discussed Posts
representatives from Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, and others. The stated
reason for assembling this group, most of whom are in direct competition with each other, was in
SEO At the Enterprise Level--A Major
reaction to recent usability studies on OpenID (one by Yahoo and one by Google), which made it Flop
clear that the current implementations of OpenID are confusing to mainstream users. The unstated 70 comments
reason that fifty of us packed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, was to muster a collective response
Techrigy Hits 1 Billion Conversations--
to Facebook Connect.
Think Google Alerts On Steroids
51 comments
You see, it’s been about a month since the first implementation of Facebook Connect was spotted

Identity 2.0 The next generation of Identity

« Big Boys and OpenID • Passport vs OpenID vs Facebook Connect »

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About Dick Hardt
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Facebook Connect - fatal blow for OpenID?
July 23, 2008 in Identity Tech, OpenID by Dick

Search
At F8 today, Facebook rolled out their Facebook Connect platform. With a small
IDENTITY 2.0 BLOGGERS:
amount of code, other sites can integrate the Facebook identity system into their
site. The keynote reminded me of early days of Microsoft as they rallied Doc Searls
developers to build on their platform by explaining how the platform can help
Johannes Ernst
them and being inclusive. They even seemed humble as they talked about what
they have done wrong in the past and then reaching out to developers asking for Kaliya Hamlin
their feedback. They even have a fund and a competition for best applications. Kim Cameron
Marc Canter
Facebook Connect is a powerful identity system. Using Facebook Connect, a site
gets access to the user’s profile data and the users friends. For sites such as Digg Phil Windley
and Movable Type that want to make users accountable for their activity, there is PAST EVENTS:
an implicit reputation of the user based on the depth of the profile. It is much
more difficult for a spammer to build a Facebook identity to spam these Internet Identity Workshop
participatory sites. Facebook is all about real identity rather then a fake persona. Web 2.0 Conference
Facebook even has rich privacy controls so that users feel in control of who sees
what. POINTS OF VIEW:

The promise of OpenID was to make login simple and move profile data. A Identity 2.0 talk at OSCON
number of us have been looking at using OpenID to make an accountable web. Identity 2.0 talk at Web 2.0


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MySpaceID: MySpace Sides with the Open Stack
Written by Rick Turoczy / December 8, 2008 10:50 PM / 1 Comments « Prior Post Next Post »

A few months ago, MySpace began to reveal details about its answer
to Facebook Connect - MySpace Data Availability. At the time, we
were left to guess what the offering would contain. What we did know
was that - in stark contrast to the proprietary nature of Facebook Connect - MySpace had chosen
to rely on the Open Stack, using OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID to build its service. Now,
MySpace has released that functionality - renamed MySpaceID - and, in so doing, it has helped
Open Standards take another step forward, as well.

For added effect, MySpace has chosen to include Google Friend Connect, a service that
Facebook has yet to use. The mix of MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect enables MySpaceID
partners to deliver even more social functionality, without a great deal of development time. RWW SPONSORS

What's more, it fires a very real shot across Facebook's bow. And continues to set the stage for
the tag-team match between the more proprietary Facebook-Microsoft and the more open
MySpace-Google.

The initial release is both limited in scope - it allows MySpace users to connect their profile
information to third party sites and find MySpace friends who use those sites - and limited in sites
that support it - the launch partners are Netvibes and Vodafone.

That said, MySpaceID is still a decided step forward for the open Web and data portability.

Everything Old Is New Again
For those of you who were around for Web 1.0, this is all probably starting to seem incredibly
familiar. At that time, everyday users began exploring quot;the Internetquot; within constrained proprietary

For Developers | Discuss | Demand | OpenID Foundation | Worldwide

What Where How
is OpenID? can I use it? do I get one?

« PayPal joins OpenID Foundation Board as we enter 2009

Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board with a commitment to better
user experience
Posted February 5th, 2009 at 11:30 pm GMT by David Recordon and Chris Messina

Today we’re excited to join Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer in announcing
that they have joined the OpenID Foundation’s board as a sustaining
corporate member.

Luke Shepard, a key member of Facebook’s Platform and Connect
teams and a huge internal advocate for OpenID, has been selected as their representative and joins
the current board of seven community elected board members and six sustaining corporate members:
Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal (joined last week), VeriSign and Yahoo!. Additionally, to maintain the
ratio of community and corporate board members, Joseph Smarr will be joining the board as our
eighth community member.

As the OpenID community entered 2009 two key topics have become the focal points on the road to
mainstream adoption: user experience and security.

Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook
working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach. As a first step, Facebook will
be hosting a design summit next week at their campus in Palo Alto which follows a similar summit on
user experience hosted at Yahoo! last year. The summit will convene some of the top designers from
Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo!, focusing on how existing
OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect.

Facebook’s financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company’s
enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their
adoption of OpenID as a standard. Facebook furthering its commitment to openness couldn’t have
come at a better time to make 2009 an amazing year for OpenID and the wider social web.

For press contacts, please call OpenID Foundation board members David Recordon at 503.341.3009
or Chris Messina at 412.225.1051.

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Developer Blog Press Platform Updates

Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, Share Recent News
Archived Posts
and Video to Facebook Platform Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes,
2009 4:54PM, Friday Feb 6th Links, and Video to Facebook Platform
February (3) Published by Chris Putnam February 6, 2009
January (8)
We're launching several new APIs for Facebook Platform today. These new
2008 Next Steps in Openness
interfaces open up access to the content and methods for sharing through
December (12) February 5, 2009
several Facebook Applications -- including Facebook Status, Notes, Links (what
November (8)
we used to call Posted Items), and Video -- to go along with the APIs already Postcards from January Garages
October (3)
available for uploading and viewing through Facebook Photos. We've seen February 2, 2009
September (6)
increasing engagement with over 15 million users updating their status each
August (7)
day and sharing over 24 million links per month. We wanted to make sure this January Platform News
July (15)
content and the ability to share this content was available through our January 31, 2009
June (8)
standard APIs.
May (11) Try Out the New FBJS
April (7) January 30, 2009
Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user's status,
March (7)
links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have
February (9) Facebook Connect and Apple’s iPhoto
access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that
January (11) ’09
are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we're opening new APIs for
2007 January 29, 2009
you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and
December (5)
we've made setting a user's status easier.
November (5) Shalom from Facebook Developer
October (10) Garage Israel!
We're pretty excited to see what kinds of ideas you can come up with to help
September (4) January 16, 2009
users create and share more content. For example, a travel application could
August (5) make it really easy for users to create and share notes and upload photos and Changes in Facebook Platform
July (2) videos from a recent trip. Users could then display that content within a Leadership
June (1) profile tab for that app. Or a news website could use Facebook Connect to January 16, 2009
May (2) allow users to easily post links from the site and feature all of the most recent
April (1) links that a user's friends have shared from that website. Extending FBML with Custom Tags
March (3) January 13, 2009
February (3) Every user is subject to limits on the length and size of the video files they
January (3) can upload, just like they are when uploading through Facebook. Use Subscribe
2006 video.getUploadLimits to determine a specific user's limits. To increase video

The Real McCrea
John McCrea on the emergence of the Social Web; follow me on Twitter @johnmccrea
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Facebook Launches its “Open Stream API,”
Supporting the Emerging Activity Stream Spec
April 27, 2009 in Uncategorized

Getting the week off to a bright start, Facebook this morning unveiled a new
“Open Stream API,” which gives developers off-site access to the core experience
of Facebook. As TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, this is a big deal:

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side
with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client
applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is
happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter.
Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will
prevail.

It’s also a big deal in terms of Facebook supporting open standards. Rather than
develop their own proprietary Activity Stream API, Facebook embraced the
emerging Activity Streams open spec:

To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the
Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity
Streams standard. Over the last several months, we’ve been
collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at
Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about
Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working
alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing
and consuming streams is the future. We’ll continue to make
contributions to the standards community and related
technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies
to implement Activity Streams at scale.

This is awesome news. Props to my friends over at Facebook!

“Now, you can feed the content you’re sharing on
Facebook over to Plaxo for sharing to your friends
here. In addition, you can sync your status updates
between the two services (in either or both
directions). And, when you share a link or post a
review in Plaxo, you can also share it over to your
friends on Facebook.”

“Now, you can feed the content you’re sharing on
Facebook over to Plaxo for sharing to your friends
here. In addition, you can sync your status updates
between the two services (in either or both
directions). And, when you share a link or post a
review in Plaxo, you can also share it over to your
friends on Facebook.”

“Starting today, we will honor Facebook friendships on
Plaxo (for anyone who wants us to). That means that
you can leverage the friends list you’ve built up on
Facebook to help you get more connected on Plaxo –
without having to manually re-friend those people,
one-at-a-time.”

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Facebook Becomes Largest OpenID Relying
Party
by Jason Kincaid on May 18, 2009 42 Comments

OpenID is getting a big boost today as Facebook goes live
with its support as a relying party for the standard. It’s a
major win for OpenID, which has long had to deal with major
companies only half-heartedly embracing the standard,
sometimes announcing support to reap the press coverage
only to let the effort languish for many months. Facebook
announced its intended support of OpenID in April, and less than a month later they’ve delivered.

So what changes for users? You’ll now be able to link your Facebook account with your Gmail
account, along with those from other OpenID providers. This means that if you’ve logged in to
Gmail to check your messages, and you pop over to Facebook, you won’t have to sign in with your
Facebook username - you’ll already be logged in. New Facebook members will also be able to
register with their Gmail accounts.

Now, Facebook isn’t the first major company to hop on board the OpenID movement - we’ve seen
announcements from Google, Microsoft, and a bevy of others. But for the most part these are only
signing on as “issuing parties”, which means they’ll let you log in with their accounts on other
OpenID supporting sites. But they’re not “relying parties”, which means that they won’t accept
OpenID logins created through other services. In other words, Google is happy to let you use your
Gmail account to log in to Facebook, but you can’t use your OpenID-enabled Microsoft ID to login
to a Google service.

Depending on how much Facebook promotes the new feature, it could help OpenID get broader
recognition than it currently has (most people have no idea what it is, and many of us who do still
find it more than a little confusing). But even if it does see wide use on Facebook, don’t expect big
players like Google or Yahoo to follow suit and become relying parties any time soon.

Who owns your data and content?

Why don't the social networks and communication tools
you use work well together? Tune in each week to
learn about the progress being made toward opening
up the Social Web.

With a revolving cast of characters, we'll have some of
the key technologists working on building the Social
Web to explain what is going on; but this isn't a show
about technology. It's about explaining what's going on
in the fight to make sure you have control of your data,
your content, and your privacy -- and the freedom to
access your stuff from all over the Web.

The Panelists quot;The Future of the Social Web in Five Erasquot;
John McCrea John McCrea and Joseph Smarr welcome special guest, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, for a discussion of
therealmccrea.com
quot;The Five Eras of the Social Webquot;. Watch HiRes
john@plaxo.com

Links related to this episode:
David Recordon
davidrecordon.com
Jeremiah Owyang's blogpost announcing the report The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras
david@sixapart.com
Plaxo's blogpost announcing Status Update: Plaxo and Facebook are now in an “Open Relationship”
John McCrea's blogpost with Photos from the “Birth of the Social Web” at Facebook This Evening
Joseph Smarr
josephsmarr.com
Posted on May 12, 2009 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
joseph@plaxo.com

Chris Messina
factoryjoe.com
chris@citizenagency.com

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Blog
Links
Open, distributed, social. Chat

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Silo free living. Blogroll
Chris Messina
Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us Stephen Paul Weber
in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and Steve Ivy
server-side. Microformats, standard APIs, and open-source software are key building blocks of Will Norris
these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides: Information, Identity, and
Interaction. DiSo - Distributed
Diso Code

DiSo (dee • soh) is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and DiSo on Flickr

interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web. DiSo on Ma.gnolia
DiSo on Twitter

Our first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there. DiSo Wiki

So what does that mean?
DiSo Project
We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on: Visit this group

microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles Archives
OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server June 2008
OAuth May 2008
…and others December 2007

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David Recordon
Hacker. Scuba Diver. Entrepreneur.

Contact Me
Tuesday David Recordon
David tweeted, quot;@factoryjoe agreed that quot;Connectquot; applications help reduce friction and make the social San Francisco CA 94158
web easier to use. Want to elaborate in a comment?quot;
recordond@gmail.com
David posted O'Reilly Radar: Anatomy of quot;Connectquot; david@sixapart.com

David is attending San Francisco XMPP and Jabber Technologies Meetup at Yahoo Brickhouse
David tweeted, quot;RT @factoryjoe: Latest BBC Digital Planet podcast focuses on Tweetups and OpenID
(starts at 10:53) -- featuring me! ;) http://tr.im/digitalpquot; Find Me Elsewhere
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to 8th
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again.quot;

Monday
David posted Webstock Trading Card Game

David saved My trading card as a favorite photo

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David posted Wellington Harbor

2) Stop leaking
passwords!

http://adactio.com/journal/1357

(emerging standard; quot;your valet key for the webquot;)

3) Support OpenID
sign in.

UserVoice Interscope Records

http://blog.janrain.com/2009/01/why-websites-should-accept-multiple.html


What Where How

« PAPE Approved as an OpenID Specification PayPal joins OpenID Foundation Board as we enter 2009 »

2008: Momentum
Posted January 15th, 2009 at 8:51 pm GMT by David Recordon

2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community
created significant momentum moving toward mainstream
adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor
does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year
alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more
than tripled 1. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly
accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half
a billion OpenID enabled accounts.

AOL2, Google 3, Microsoft 4, mixi (the largest social network in Japan)5 and Yahoo! 6 have all shipped
OpenID Provider implementations with nearly all of them supporting OpenID 2.0.

In addition to many of the independent OpenID Providers already supporting the ability to exchange
profile data, Google added the ability to do so in a limited fashion with AOL7, mixi8 and Yahoo! 9 have
all introduced it in a limited beta fashion. This means that OpenID users signing into your site will
easily be able to share information like their preferred username or email address if they wish to do so.

A number of major sites added support to sign in using OpenID including AOL’s MapQuest10, Google’s
Blogger11, Microsoft’s Health Vault 12, SourceForge13 as well as the commenting services TypePad
Connect14 and Intense Debate (which in turn enabled Barack Obama’s Change.gov15). Google Friend
Connect also enabled any site to support OpenID sign in via JavaScript16 which thousands of sites have
done.

Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! joined the board of the OpenID Foundation 17 bringing
additional insight, complementing the community board members and helping financially support the
organization.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/vogelium/309939910/


What Where How

« An Update on the Retail Advisory Committee and Improving User Experience

Google and JanRain Release Support for the OpenID User Interface
Extension
Posted May 14th, 2009 at 6:07 pm GMT by David Recordon | Edit

This morning, Google released an upgrade to their OpenID Provider to support the draft OpenID User
Interface Extension along with JanRain who added support for it to their Relying Party service RPX.
This means that Google users signing into sites like UserVoice (choose “Google” to see it in action)
now have a much better user experience; one much closer to that of Facebook Connect. Google also
allows users to choose to share their profile information with Relying Parties via OpenID Attribute
Exchange and the Google Data APIs via OAuth.

The OpenID User Interface Extension is one of the main pieces of work that has come from the OpenID
Design Summit hosted by Facebook earlier this year. The extension replaces the traditional OpenID
sign in flow of being redirected from the Relying Party to the OpenID Provider with a popup window
which shows the URL bar on top of the Relying Party itself.

The Google Code Blog writes about their implementation in more detail:

The new popup style UI, which implements the OpenID User Interface Extension
Specification, is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically,
it’s designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and
visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window.
JanRain, a provider of OpenID solutions, is an early adopter of the new API, and already
offers it as part of their RPX product. As demonstrated by UserVoice using JanRain’s RPX, the
initial step on the sign-in page of the Relying Party website is identical to that of the “full
page” version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI.

Once the user selects to sign in using his or her Google Account, the Google approval page
is displayed. However, it does not replace the Relying Party’s page in the main browser
window. Instead it is displayed as a popup window on top of it. We have updated our Open
Source project to include a complete Relying Party example, providing code for both the
back-end (in Java) and front-end (javascript) components.

Once the user approves the request, the popup page closes, and the user is signed in to the
Relying Party website.


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Comcast Property Sees 92% Success Rate With New Mobile retail software
designed for in-store retail tasks. E.g. stock
OpenID Method counting, receiving etc.
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / February 10, 2009 2:33 PM / 22 Comments « Prior Post Next Post » www.handpoint.com

Dell Business Computers
The most-watched geek event of the day has to be the OpenID UX
Business Computer Powered By Intel®
(User Experience) Summit, hosted at the Facebook headquaters. The Core™ 2 Duo On Sale Online, At Dell
www.nz.dell.com
most discussed moment of the day will surely be the presentation by
Comcast's Plaxo team. New Zealand Site
Features 130,000 Members. Discover Why
Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may It's So Popular!
www.smilecity.co.nz
represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown,
it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience
Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login
system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear RWW SPONSORS

closer than ever to being solved for good.

This experimental method refers to big, known brands where users were already logged in, it
requires zero typing - just two clicks - and it takes advantage of the OpenID authentication
opportunity to get quick permission to leverage the well established OAuth data swap to facilitate
immediate personalization - at the same time, with nothing but 2 clicks required of users.

Plaxo, primarily known for the noxious flood of spam emails it delivered in its early days, is now an
online user activity data stream aggregator owned by telecom giant Comcast. The Plaxo team has
been at the forefront of the new Open Web paradigm best known for the OpenID protocol.

The Flow
The method Plaxo has been testing is called an OpenID/OAuth combo, in collaboration with

What Plaxo Found

• Better for the user:anti-pattern rate
with no password
higher success

• Better for the provider: Happy users and
no automated data scraping

• Better for the site: Higher conversion
rate; more informed social graph

1) Markup existing
public data.

2) Stop leaking
passwords!

3) Support OpenID
sign in.

Thank You!
David Recordon
david@sixapart.com

Decentralized Social Networks and Portable Contacts

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