Rev2.org

The OpenID Foundation announced yesterday, in what it seems will push their decentralized login system further as a standard, that five big players of web and technology world — Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo! — have joined their corporate board. For those of us tired of having to remember and maintain several online logins and passwords, this could be very good news. With a catch.

A Brief History
OpenID started out as a project in 2005 by LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick as a way to maintain a common login between websites, and grew, with support from groups LightWeight Identity (responsible for the Yadis protocol, which is an integral part of OpenID), NetMesh, Six Apart, and Sxip among others. The concept received enough support and attention that it made its way towards becoming a” portable web indentity standard”, leading to the formation of The OpenID Foundation in June 2007.

The Ecosystem
Websites may play any of a number of roles available in the OpenID ecosystem: an ‘OpenID provider‘ that allows you to create your OpenID login with them, a ‘server-agent‘ responsible for verifying a user’s login and a ‘relying party’ that supports and allows users to login with their OpenIDs. The thing is that a lot, over half, of those ten thousand OpenID sites, including AOL, Orange and Yahoo!, fall in just that first category as providers. A July 2007 ‘State of OpenID’ keynote by Scott Kveton, a board member of the Foundation, listed just short of 4,500 OpenID-relying websites – the ones that actually accept the these portable Web indentities. So while yesterday’s announcement of five big players joining the corporate board helps the standard to well, gain ground as a standard, there’s understandably quite a while to go before OpenID is able to truly achieve its goal.

The Decentralized Solution
Because the system aims to be “centralized” in a decentralized way, the Foundation, according to its website, “does not dictate the technical direction” of the standard, existing only to “help enable and protect whatever is created by the community” by managing legal issues, helping in promotion and marketing and generally tying the knots an open standard is bound to have. What it all comes down to is a group of web companies agreeing to support a single login standard and to not be inclined to commandeer the project to their own benefits. To the end user — you, me and everyone else wondering how this will help make our Web lives better — the implications are intriuging: especially since yours may already be one of the over 300 million existing OpenID logins without your knowing it!

The fact that, over the years, websites with enormous user bases and following — AOL, LiveJournal, Vox, WordPress.com, Blogger, Basecamp, Highrise — have come to support OpenID means that if you have an account with any of them, you already have OpenID. So, in that ideal world that OpenID hopes to create, you’ll be able to use just one of these in all of the around ten thousand other websites that support the standard. And now that the most powerful Web giants Google and Yahoo! have joined in, it would appear that this vision is only coming closer to realization. That, however, will depend on the level of commitment these websites choose to make to cement this standard (or not).

The Decentralized Problem
Part of the problem is perhaps OpenID’s most basic and noble virtue of being “decentralized” and as open and liberal as possible; this also means that the goal of maintaining a single easy-to-remember login is hampered because we are given so many options. At this very moment, you could have several OpenIDs already – which one do you use where and how do you manage them? I use Google extensively, but am also a Yahoo! user thanks to Flickr and have an account with AOL to use with iChat. I know some websites now accept OpenID login, but where do I go from here?

And that’s the other problem. Since OpenID is still, even with support from so many huge companies, in its infancy, it hasn’t caught on quite as yet. The logo isn’t very prominent (as Passport.net was at one point, when MSN and Hotmail ruled supreme) and, as a growing standard still being shaped in the hands of geeks for the most part, which means it isn’t nearly as visible or easy to use as it ought to be. Users don’t want to know what Identifiers are, or what XRIs mean or what the server-agent does; I doubt a lot of web users would even be impressed with a login that looks like openid.aol.com/username42, which, although it makes sense in a strictly technical point of view, will most likely not appeal much to “end users”.

Conclusion
If there’s anything to be learned from the meteoric growth of Web 2.0, it’s that users like and gravitate towards products and services that are easy to use, are beautiful and don’t make them work too much. OpenID’s recent announcement and its past accomplishments signal a rapidly strengthening and upcoming standard; however, it seems there’s still quite a fair bit of work left before it can truly reach people and make it easier for them to manage their online identity.

Google today introduced a new feature as part of Google Docs that will make collecting data for your spreadsheets very easy. Now, every time you want other users/team members/collaborators to contribute data to your spreadsheet, you can do so in a very simple way.

Here’s how it works: you design a form with individual fields or information that you’d like people to fill — corresponding to your spreadsheet — and send as many invitation emails (with a link to your form) as you like. Their results, or whatever they input into the form, is then directly inserted into your spreadsheet. The best part is that recipients don’t need to be Gmail users, so anyone with an email address can input data once they’ve been sent an invitation.

Form fields can be of any of the five types available — single-line text, multi-line paragraph text, multiple choice (radio buttons), checkboxes or a choice-list — and you can have as many or as little of them as you like in your form. The interface also allows you to enter, besides the usual title and description of your form, “help text” for each field so you can further the cut down on redundancy in having to individually explain the more tougher questions to every participant. You can even edit your form after you’ve designed it and sent invitations if you feel something needs to be clarified, which is handy when you’re doing a survey and start getting asked the same questions again and again.

User data is automatically timestamped and collected either in a new spreadsheet with columns corresponding to the data fields you created if you designed your form first or on your working spreadsheet if you designed the form around it. A Google Docs form gadget for iGoogle that lists the ten latest replies is also available if you would like to track responses there.

Something I found missing was a numerical field option and a way to validate answers. Although users may indeed enter numbers in the text fields, and sorting them in ascending or descending order is possible, this approach isn’t very elegant when it comes to handling massive amounts of numerical information, especially if some data meant to be numerical have other characters in them (currency symbols, delimiters, symbols are common with numbers). Validation is also important, for example, to ensure information that is absolutely required are present or to ensure values are within a certain acceptable range.

This simple feature would’ve helped a lot when I was doing a market survey for a mobile phone company a year ago. Considering that most people I talked to and gathered information from were capable of following a link from an email and filling in a form, these forms would greatly help save time and effort: I wouldn’t need to manually copy data from Excel spreadsheets attached to emails, wouldn’t need to hand-input data from respondents who just simply typed answers the body of the email and wouldn’t need to spend all that time answering the same questions over the phone.

The form feature might be a simple upgrade — simply one more way to share and collaborate on your spreadsheets — but as anyone who has ever had to collect data from a lot of people over the web will tell you, it can be immensely useful.

The newest release of Google Earth, version 4.2, comes with a hidden flight simulator. No, it’s not the other way around and yes, it’s still free. For all supported OSes.

Although the simulator appears very basic, with just 2 aircraft and 27 airports, it seems like this part of the software is in beta (and therefore largely undocumented) and some have speculated that this “could become a standard feature” in future versions, introducing the rather exciting prospect of Google getting into designing games (not that flight simulators are games). Or, with the release of Sky that’s got astronomers screaming in joy, “Power to the people!” (or something else to that effect), who knows? A space simulator, perhaps?

The two airliners available for you to fly at the moment are the F-16 Fighting Falcon (or ‘Viper’, as Google Earth and some pilots like to call it), a lightweight forth-generation fighter, and the Cirrus SR22, a single-engine prop fixed-landing gear four-seater popular with business flyers and learners (competing with the Cessna 172). The F-16, which can reach speeds exceeding Mach 2 and fly higher than 50,000ft, is a tougher aircraft to maneuver in the simulator, compared to the SR22, which can cruise at a maximum of 330km/h and fly up to 25,000ft.

What’s interesting is that the default starting position is runway 02 of Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA/VNKT) in the capital of Nepal (my home airport), which, of late, has been drawing the interests of major international airlines. And, apparently, Google. Other airports you can fly out of include London Heathrow, Los Angeles, Kilimanjaro, Palo Alto, Sydney, Pokhara. Any one of the 27 available.

Realism, unsurprisingly, is not a focus of this simulation. Fun is. Getting to fly over satellite images of the world is just plain cool. But if you’re looking for a real flight simulator, there’s always the multi-platform free and open-source sim FlightGear, or commercial alternatives Microsoft Flight Simulator and the uber-realistic X-Plane, among others.

The hidden simulator was initially discovered by Marco Gallotta, who found that hitting Command + Option + A (or Ctrl + Alt + A if you’re in Windows) invoked a launcher window. The only bit of documentation from Google at this point is a list of keyboard commands in the Google Earth User Guide. But you can check out the many video demos already uploaded to YouTube.

Bolt.com, an online video sharing site, has posted a notice on its front page (now the only page), notifying all that, as of August 14, 2007, it has ceased all video sharing operations. The general assignment, or ‘assignment for the benefit of creditors’, executed by parent companies Net Revolution, Inc. and Bolt, Inc. means that, due to bankruptcy, Bolt.com’s assets will now be quickly sold off and the proceeds from liquidation paid to creditors.

Possibly related to this new development is the fact that in March of this year, Universal Music reached a settlement with Bolt.com — a copyright infringement suit — under the terms that Bolt.com would pay it (for damages) a huge portion of what it makes of its sale to another company GoFish, receive a “small licensing fee” and “a share of associated advertising revenue”, according to an FT.com report.

This isn’t the first time Universal has punished online video-sharing websites for copyright infringement; the video giant YouTube in September 2006 had to pay “tens of millions of dollars of company stock and also share advertising revenue and pay licensing fees”. It didn’t suffer a similar fate, though, thanks to search giant Google’s acquiring it the next month.

As the message on their site goes:

Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased. Net Revolution, Inc. and Bolt, Inc. have executed an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors effective as of August 14, 2007. Please direct any creditor related questions or comments to the Assignee’s office to the attention of:

Development Specialists, Inc.
345 California Street
Suite 1150
San Francisco, California 94104-2664

This leaves us with one thing to wonder: what in the world is happening with the domain? You know, Bolt doesn’t make half as bad as a synonym for Rev2

Some time back, we told you the iPhone had been partially unlocked to allow outgoing calls with Australia’s Telstra; but now, thanks to the efforts of members in hackint0sh.org team, there’s now a way to get everything working — incoming, outgoing, SMS — with certain carriers in Europe. This method might also work in other areas.

The hack involves extracting communications information from the carrier’s SIM card as well as from the original AT&T card, using the information to update downloadable flash and EEPROM files, and finally writing them onto a new SilverCard to create what the hackers are calling a SuperSim.

The process requires access to a SIM reader/writer, a SilverCard, a non-AT&T carrier’s SIM (which has to be of the V1 type, to get a certain ‘Ki number’), an iPhone, some freely downloadable files and software, and a healthy appetite for risk-taking (hint: your other SIM could breath its last).

Important: In essence, this is making a copy–one that happens to work with the iPhone–of a network’s card, which, according to ozbimmer of the original Aussie hack, is “borderline illegal” in a lot of countries. Others members also posting in the original hackint0sh.org thread have warned about possible undesirable consequences, including, besides compromising the iPhone’s warranty and having one’s carrier subscription canceled, hefty penalties and even jail time (no jailbreak here). Rev2.org, therefore, provides this information for purely informational purposes.

The iPhone, with its Web 2.0 approach to serving applications, will officially be available in Europe and other areas late 2007/early 2008. If you can’t wait, though, and are willing to take the road less traveled (with huge warning signs nonetheless), you’ll want to keep an eye on the hackint0sh.org forums and the iPhone Dev Team IRC (#iphone at irc.osx86.hu).

To most Americans, Bebo, the third most popular social network (after Facebook and MySpace) in terms of users and pageviews, would be unheard of. The social network was the most popular search term on Google for 2006 and has managed to cause a storm internationally. We decided to delve a bit deeper and investigate what is behind the Valley-based 50 employee startup that seems to be changing the ‘rest’ of the world. Let’s take an in-depth look at Bebo.

Background

Bebo was created by Michael Birch and his wife Xochi Birch in early 2005. Immensely popular in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, its userbase (over 34 million) spans the world. The company, with its 50 employees, is based in San Fransisco, CA, and recently received a $15 million funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Backend Technology

Bebo is powered by Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition Release 2 (announced in last year’s Oracle OpenWorld) running on six processors, which forms the infrastructure required to support, according to CEO Michael Birch to SearchOracle.com, “more than 100 million site page views per day and about 1.2 million image uploads per day” and 7 billion monthly page views. The new Enterprise-grade database system is the same kind that Motorola employs for its biometric systems-related operations all over the world. Bebo upgraded from Standard One Edition in hopes of meeting performance requirements to be able to beat top competing online social networking website MySpace to become number one.

Competition is fierce; when Facebook announced that it would open up to third-party developers, MySpace followed suit. As did LinkedIn and, now, Bebo. Bebo, in fact, did previously allow third party contribution to the website, albeit very selective, in the form of widgets (100,000 of which were apparently created in the first 12 hours of the feature’s launch). It’s clear that each of these sites wants to rule the web with their most powerful weapon – people. No details about any API has been revealed yet, but we expect more information soon.

Safety Matters

It’s obvious from the time you first enter the website that safety of users is important to the Bebo team; the homepage has a section titled “Stay Safe” that links to BlogSafety.com and their own Safety Tips, the profile page strongly recommends users under 21 to keep their profile private, the registration form features a link to their privacy policy page which mentions, in human English, that “the founders and employees of Bebo take your privacy very seriously.” And for good reason: in March of last year, Bebo received a lot of attention from English media when it was blocked by the Norfolk Educational County because it found that teenagers were using the site for bullying and pornography. This year too, in March, a violent sectarian fight broke out in Northern Ireland that was apparently organized over Bebo.

And yet, when you’re in the business of getting people — diverse, different, and passionate people — together in one place, you’re bound to run into trouble. So although there seems to be a new social networking website popping up every other day, Bebo has learned the hard way the responsibilities associated with running such a site.

Participation & People

Registration to Bebo is easy, and has two standard parts to it. The public profile information, which they warn “may be seen by others”, includes your name, username, date of birth (you have the option of not publicizing your age), gender and country. The second part is your private password and email address, and a word verification (no SnapPages-y animated verification text here). It’s not until after the registration that you’re bombarded with forms to fill so the Bebo community can know you better.

This profile section of the website will look, to anyone even partially informed about database design and normalization, like one huge mess. Besides the 1000-character text area for your usual biographical information (‘Me, My Life, And I’), you are offered seven custom fields to introduce yourself; Bebo recommends ‘Music’, ‘Film’, ‘Sports’, ‘Scared Of’, ‘Happiest When’, and leaves the last two for you to add. The image I got is of the sort of (un)uniformity mess we’re used to of MySpace profiles, with every page being very, very different and very, very confusing. Individuality, perhaps, but at the cost of burdening your senses. A more flexible tag-based approach (like in Facebook) would probably have been a better approach, with automatic completion (like Google Suggest) for the more common tags to maintain uniformity, but that isn’t the case.
(more…)