You’ve probably already heard of OpenID. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a new and upcoming standard for user authentication (and fellow Gizbuzz blogger Huw gave a nice introduction here).

I personally think OpenID is a great idea, and I’m a proponent of the idea and the standard. For a web development project I’m working on at the moment, we’re going to be using OpenID as the sole authentication system for users. That is to say, you will need an OpenID to actually sign up for the service and it will be the single system controlling your sign in.

There’s a problem though. The average computer user has never heard of OpenID, doesn’t really understand it and might be turned away from using this new service if they don’t very quickly ‘get’ how to sign up. We could have just shunned OpenID, built another proprietary username/password system and be done with it.

As a web service provider, though, I feel we have a responsibility to be pushing for new standards and helping spread OpenID. After all, it’s only through the widespread adoption of standards that the web is what it is today.

So we want to push OpenID and bring it to the forefront. What do we need to do?

Service adoption

I’m doing my bit here. New services (and existing ones) need to either support OpenID or use it as their single authentication solution. Until services force people to get OpenIDs, people simply won’t bother.

Huw mentioned in a follow-up comment on our previous OpenID post:

“I initially got an OpenID because Zooomr required me to have one. Now I use it on other services.”

If that’s the case for techies, it will be the same, if not more difficult, to convince the average user to get an OpenID. Which means new services need to push.

User education

Users need to be shown the benefits of OpenID to them – the fact that they don’t need to remember millions of passwords, maintain separate accounts on different services.

Privacy. Interoperability. Time saving.

We need to sell OpenID to them on the benefits to the end user (and leave the techie stuff where it belongs).

Interoperability with other credential systems

AOL have already done an excellent job at this by giving everyone with an AOL/AIM Screen Name an OpenID, in the form of openid.aol.com/screenname.

Now we need everyone else to join in. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, I’m looking at you. Maybe we have to do something to sweeten the deal for them, I don’t know. Without the support of the big players, OpenID will be in for a tough fight.

Advertising

This sort of ties in with user education, but still, we need OpenID to get advertised and publicised. Again, stress the benefits for the end user and where appropriate, also show the technical advantages.

The more people who know what OpenID is, the more people might use it.

I personally am very keen to see OpenID becoming a success and I hope that with enough effort, it can become a part of the future of the web.

One of the first things to actually make this move was email. It feels like webmail clients have existed forever. Hotmail was the startup (back before Microsoft owned them) that really brought webmail to mainstream use and since then we’ve seen many other services.

Most notably has been Gmail, which was one of the first mainstream webmail services to bring a user interface built on Ajax technology. This move (and other Ajax interfaces we now see in Yahoo Mail, the beta Hotmail interface and others) has brought the webmail experience pretty much on par with that of desktop clients.

So – with webmail services like Gmail providing such a rich user experience, are desktop email clients even relevant any more? If they are, are their days numbered?

Desktop clients have also come a very long way since the early days of email. Nowadays, desktop clients provide a very rich user experience, with benefits of desktop integration and the ability to integrate with other systems like calendars and complete groupware suites which allow people to work together collaboratively.

But now that webmail services are rapidly bridging that user experience gap, their greatest strength – availability everywhere is starting to mean that webmail can really provide a better service. Unlike a desktop system, where you have to have a client and to set it up, you can literally walk up to virtually any internet-enabled computer to use webmail.

Certainly this is starting to happen in home settings, where people are increasingly choosing not to go with their ISP’s standard mail service and opting for webmail-based solutions. I think it’s fairly clear that unless desktop clients can integrate extremely well with webmail setups, they are likely to become less and less relevant.

The enterprise is a completely different issue, however. Currently, the Microsoft Exchange on the server side and Microsoft Outlook client combination is probably the most dominant setup. While Exchange does provide a webmail client, the experience is arguably not as good as using Outlook itself. In a business setting, it’s also harder to convince a change of system, as migrating a system as important as email is undoubtedly very expensive and the benefits of an alternative system would have to be heavily justified.

What will the situation be in 5 years time?

Inevitably, with the fast paced world of technology, sometime within the next 5 years, these businesses wil start to think about upgrading. If web-based enterprise email solutions like Zimbra for example can continue and provide an extremely compelling web-based groupware solution, Exchange+Outlook could have a serious fight on their hands.

On the residental side of things, I think we’ll probably see a continuing trend of people using webmail rather than their ISP’s POP and SMTP systems in combination with desktop client. Unless something really compelling comes out in the way of desktop systems, the average person will probably just continue how they are now.

At the moment, I actually use both. My primary email account is a Gmail account, but I use Gmail’s POP access functionality to pipe it into Thunderbird on my desktop. I get the benefits of a desktop client (which is a nice local backup) and the ability to check and send my email anywhere. And I’m looking forward to Thunderbird 2 too.

Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight – a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

A Microsoft employee blog post on the subject gives a bit more information. The marketing copy states the main features:

• Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
• Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is less than 2 megabyte (MB) and works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Macintosh computers and Windows-based personal computers without any additional installation requirements.
• Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
• Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.
• Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.

Microsoft unveiled the new technology at the National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas (also announced there were various updates to Apple’s Final Cut Studio, see our sister blog YouMakeMedia for details).

Microsoft is clearly taking this opportunity to push their technology which Silverlight leverages, including XAML, .NET and various components of a web-oriented version of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Certainly Silverlight does provide some additional functionality over what Flash currently does. Interestingly, one of the things that is mentioned as coming soon is DRM support for Silverlight content, which will be implemented for both platforms. This is, quite interestingly, quietly noted on one page rather than being shouted about by Microsoft.

Perhaps I’m missing the point, but at the moment, I don’t really see the point of using something like Silverlight over Flash. While it does promise to leverage plenty of interesting new technology that Flash currently doesn’t or can’t support, feature-wise there appears to be little practical difference between the two.

Of course that could well change. Microsoft are saying that they’re keeping something under wraps, so this could be the ‘killer feature’ that they haven’t explained just yet.

Either way, it will be interesting to watch this project and see if in the coming months, Microsoft can continue to work on Silverlight until it can convince website producers that Silverlight delivers significant benefits over Flash. Only time will really tell.

Pre-release versions of Silverlight are available to download for Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X Tiger (Universal binary) from the official site.

We live in a widely heralded age of new media; anyone can put out a podcast, video or music track on the internet, and make it available to whoever wants it for next to no money, and in many cases hardly any time. Everyone’s doing it as well, right from Oratos with the Gizbuzz Podcast and PodDev to the BBC with From Our Own Correspondent and many other programmes.

What Oratos and the BBC have in common with regards to our publishing of rich media is that we both lack any tools to tell us any meaningful analytics concerning our publications. It is easy to find out how many times a file has been downloaded from your server from your logs. You can do an IP lookup and find out where any given downloader downloaded it from. But that’s about where the definite information ends.

You can conjecture more information – for example, I can look at the referrers to my post about the latest Gizbuzz podcast, and see where people came from. However, what if, as Google Blogoscoped did, people link directly to the mp3? Furthermore, how do I know whether people who downloaded the podcast listened to it? I have certainly downloaded many podcasts which I have never listened to, for whatever reason. How do I know how people listened to them? Is the Gizbuzz podcast popular for the daily commute, or do people settle down in front of their computer and concentrate?

I need to know the answers to these questions, not just for personal interest. For example, if our podcast is listened to on the commute, it should certainly strike a lighter tone than otherwise. In order for any content series, such as a podcast, to be successful in the long term, it needs to respond to consumer wants. This is infinitely harder to do if it is impossible to have full information about those who are listening to you.

There is also another problem caused by this lack of information: it encourages the use of DRM in content encoding by media giants. Large scale corporate media demands proper information about its audience, and is simply not prepared to publish in a format that it cannot monitor. By wrapping content in DRM, a content producer can control what plays that content, and the player can phone home with information, such as whether an episode was listened to in full.

At the moment, it is not possible to have full analytics without using DRM. However, for new media to flourish, and for old media to embrace it, this needs to be possible. I can’t think of any possible solution, but that’s not what the point of this series is about. At some point in the near future, this problem needs to be solved. Someone get on it!