James Senior's Blog

Today the Live ID team wrote about their findings from the Open ID preview we had been running since PDC last November.  We explored what works and what doesn’t work with the cornerstone of the Open Web, Open ID, for services with a large user base such as Windows Live which has 500+ million users worldwide.

The findings highlighted a couple of things for me: 

1. More work needs to be done on Open ID to make it ready for the masses.  We want seamless mass adoption not mass confusion.  In particular the Live ID team called out aliasing as being “unfeasible and/or just plain confusing to users!”
2. The more frequently bigger players (Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace etc) get involved and contribute feedback to the Open Web communities like Open ID, the more rapidly they can move forward and shape standards that fit everyone rather than just early adopters.  In essence the bigger players provide more perspective, fresh eyes if you will.  We will and need to drive this behavior more at Microsoft.
3. And finally, an observation that made me smile was how the Open Web drives a lot of interesting behavior with people getting envious and feeling the need to blow their own trumpets.  For instance, if you look at the Open ID mailing list notice how Google can’t help but point out their efforts in this space too.  It’s cute, but let’s not forget this isn’t a PR exercise this is about providing real feedback from real users whom we want to adopt this stuff. I would prefer Google to augment our feedback and provide perspective on such an announcement.

Today Microsoft and the Open ID took some great steps towards an Identity mechanism that works for the web.  It’s going to be great to see this feedback worked back into the spec.  After all it ain’t “my openness is bigger than your openness” it’s “our openness” and we’re not competing, we’re working together on this.

I love the fact that Tweetdeck has a feature that allows you to sync your Twitter groups and searches between computers by typing in your Tweetdeck credentials*.  The only gripe I have is that where I have long search names they add an annoying scroll bar that makes it almost impossible to read the search term and click the check box.

Sync’ing settings and configurations of desktop apps between different machines will be a trending feature in software over the coming years and I don’t expect the likes of Tweetdeck to roll their own sync engines in the future.

* Why didn’t they just use my Twitter handle?

Well I’ll be.

It looks like back home in Blighty my friends and family will be able to pick up copies of Windows 7 for the princely sum of 65 (GBP)* for the Home Premium Version.  Amazon are already flogging it on their website and Nate has all the details in his CNET UK article.

For those of you interested in an upgrade and who are going to be playing IT department for your friends and family on release day**, Sir Scott Hanselman has some details on upgrade paths and how to get Win7 on your box with the minimum of fuss.

For those of you wondering who that chap on the throne is above, please refer to this website.

* I lost the pound sterling key on my keyboard! :(
** See my future posts on me upgrading my girlfriend’s laptop from OSX to Win7 :)

Says it all really.  Looking forward to getting mine! Get yours too.

Gizmodo has all the details on the Zune HD.

I’ve seen Ray Ozzie speak a number of times and one of his favorite catchphrases that he reuses is “standing on the shoulder of giants”, and it’s starting to become a trending topic with Ev from Twitter too.  Here’s why Ev should be looking up (and down) when he’s standing on people’s shoulders.

Ray normally dishes out his shoulders/giants quotes as a hat-tip to others in the software industry who have gone before him and laid the foundation for software or services that he builds, for example when talking about Groove on his blog:

“From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft.”

Amazon were also worthy of a mention during his PDC08 keynote last year: (although not referring to them as giants, but just standing on their shoulders :-) )

“Some months after we began to plan this new effort [Azure], Amazon launched a service called EC2, and I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation and for the fact that across the industry all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as they've established some base level design patterns, architectural models and business models that we'll all learn from and grow.”

Now it seems that Ev from Twitter has picked up the same catchphrase too! He was recently speaking on an interview on the BBC where he talked about the rise of Twitter:

“Well we stood on the shoulders of giants, said Ev, neglecting to mention he came up with Blogging (Blogger) before ‘microblogging”.

It seems like everyone is standing on other people’s shoulders right now, from an idea perspective.  Of course, from a platform perspective, the idea is to get others to stand on your shoulders (e.g. Microsoft Windows, Apple’s App Store, Force.com etc.).  The more people you have standing on shoulders in your pyramid the more the rely on you, and you sure as heck better make sure that you have a solid foundation free from downtime otherwise you’ll quickly amass a angry mob.

Denial of service attacks are a bitch but you can defend against them, and today’s Twitter outage was a great example of what can happen due to a well coordinated attack.  Twitter is a platform with powerful APIs that have spawned loads of other software products, services and new business models. 

Twitter will get there in time, I'm sure, but to be a truly great platform you have to provide reliability and stability for those who are standing on your head in your pyramid.

Image courtesy of the Chinese Allstar Acrobats Inc. – keep up the good work guys.