OuterJoin is big believer of OpenId and perhaps understandably, given our Yodlee background. The OpenID Foundation formed in June 2007 has a good early start- as of July 2007, over 120 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 4,500 sites OpenID integration was reported. Membership has cut across the industry- individuals, students, non-profits, startups and industry giants.

A brief definition- OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities. This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds of usernames and passwords, and provides more control over what personal information they share with Websites when they sign-in using an OpenID.

I also see, OpenID concept promoting the decentralized, free and open standard in terms of personal information. The latest update I found was more than 10,000 Websites support OpenID log-ins, and an estimated 350 million OpenID enabled URLs currently exist. February 7, 2008 was historic day for OpenID as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joined as first corporate board members. Also adding credibility is the news that integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox 3 and OpenID can be used with Windows CardSpace.

By end of 2008, I think much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla, OpenID will also see acceptance internationally and hopefully ecommerce websites will also enter mainstream in terms of adoption, though concerns on phishing attacks and user identity theft will continue to persist.

MOLI.com is a recently launched social-networking site and our client. We have learnt what team work can achieve- they blazed trail at eTrade and are doing again at MOLI.

You might wonder “another social networking site???? But, there is method behind every madness. Unlike most social networking sites, which allow only one user profile, MOLI allows multiple profiles for the same person or entity. Now attached to these are all the different groups one is associated with. It also gives the ability to link any e-commerce endeavor. That’s powerful proposition. That’s not all, throw in original content- video, blogs, competition and events; entertainment aspect is also covered. MOLI caters to the under-served market age range of 18 and above – users, who do not want chaos, spam and have developed sophisticated tastes (who do not want to be poked).

Social Network might be perceived as saturated space but if anybody has a good chance to crack it, MOLI has to be the front runner. If you think about it- every new service/startup has social component to it, so that challenge is global and not just limited to pure ’social network’. This is the first social network with built-in ‘e-commerce’ which makes a lot of sense, since when you first start any enterprise (store or anything else); you approach your social contacts (friends & families) first.

Registration is free with a slight charge for some premium commerce tools. Check it out and get connected with me!

Google introduced Google App Engine as a way to simplify the job of creating, running and scaling web applications at Campfire One on April 7th, 2008. Google App Engine lets developers run web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The idea is to simplify the infrastructure needed to build, to maintain (no servers to maintain), and to scale with traffic & data storage needs.

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python language and most of the Python standard library. Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, I am sure Google is pulling out all stops to push more languages shortly to increase developer adoption of this new platform.

This was a preview release; it’s not feature complete and there is a quota system, a set of limits in terms of storage, CPU and bandwidth that applications can use during the preview period, right now for free. Once the preview period is over, that quota will remain free, but developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed. The cost at this moment has not been disclosed.

The quotas in the preview release included: 3 apps per developer, 500MB storage per app, and per day (rolling 24 hour) quotas of 2000 emails, 10 GB bandwidth in, 10 GB bandwidth out, 200M CPU Megacycles, 650k HTTP Requests, 2.5M datastore API calls and 160k URLFetch API calls.

I have been tracking reactions and there are interesting mixed opinions:

• For some the free 500MB worth of storage was attractive.
• Almost everybody wants more languages supported.
• Business owners are contemplating the dependency factor on Google. This means that early adopters would be independent developers and startups.
• Farhan Mashraqi said that this gives the Python language “a big boost”; so also did blist.
• A Digg comment by Fuzzmeister suggests that this could have a strong impact, “this could evolve into something that fundamentally changes the way websites are hosted and run”.
• Wayne Pan believes that the ‘free’ angle is the biggest news, and that App Engine needs other languages and an external service model to really gain traction.
• Few people see some important privacy and security concerns here.
• Few think this as a very clever move by Google for more domination.

I think last is an interesting angle. Also it will be interesting to see how this will play in Google app framework and Google’s enterprise play. Stay tuned, the story in not over yet.

I came across this paid ad and found it interesting and contrasting. Now Google Analytics is a ‘free’ tool as advertised in the ad and as we all know, but why is Google checkout button next to the ad? Possible reasons:

1. Google wants to draw attention to this ad and feels that the button will direct people’s attention

2. There is a checkout process in Google Analytics, which has been discontinued, but Google Checkout is not able to determine.

Anyways, one of the small bugs, I guess

Last week on April 3, 2008 one of the big news items was Seesmic acquiring Twhirl, an Adobe AIR based Twitter client. Now both are very small companies and I am really wondering how it can be an acquisition? Both came together in a quest to offer consumers a more complete product. One of the web 2.0 problems is that there are few companies which are product features rather than a complete product itself.

Seesmic is a video micro blogging web application developed by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. Twhirl is a very popular Twitter application; it accounts for 7 percent of the traffic on Twitter.

Seesmic plus Twhirl, powered by XMPP (Twitter supports XMPP messaging) is going to be power- Instant text and video communication and presence status, which is a more complete product than earlier and hence more attractive to consumers. Video blogging has had limited success compared to text blogging and this is a way for Seesmic to shift its focus from video to overall ‘microblogging.’ Despite Twhirl’s importance in the Twitter ecosystem, it is not a huge app by normal software standards. A combined service will provide a more compelling way of communication factoring in user’s broadcasting & time preferences.

Overall, Twhirl will benefit the Seesmic community in the following ways:

• Getting in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser.

• Twhirl works on Mac AND PC, soon on Linux too.

• Twhirl lets you easily use all the advanced messaging options of Twitter (replies, direct messages)

• Twhirl allows you to have multiple Twitter accounts opened simultaneously.

Of course, adding video to Twhirl will be a plus to the Twhirl community. Maybe I need to shift from WordPress comfort zone to the Seesmic world.