Google Friend Connect: Interesting Service, Can’t Sign Up
Yesterday, Google launched a preview release of Google Friend Connect at Campfire One. The premise is neat: Google provides you with a directory of pre-programmed social widgets (slash gadgets, slash modules, slash whatever you want to call them) that you can install on your website simply by pasting HTML code. All kinds of authentication formats are accepted, from Google Accounts to OpenID and beyond. For more nitty-gritty details, head for the official blog post or the Google Webmaster Central version (the latter is simpler).
Incidentally, there was a huge blogstorm about this yesterday, before it was officially announced and before the site was available. Rex Hammock thinks it might be the highest single-day pageview count for a 404 Error page, as he briefly states in a post entitled "Google's new Not Found feature is really fun". Go ahead, it's worth a click. (Well, Ctrl+click or Shift+click if you want to keep reading this 
but you already knew that, right?)
Sign-Up Error?
So, it sounds interesting enough that I want to get in on it. Like Google App Engine (my own coverage) from last month, there's a waiting list. (I got into App Engine, by the way, and immediately wasted one of my three indelible applications with a useless test listing I'll never code. There really should be a delete function in App Engine, but I digress...)
Unlike App Engine, though, this waiting list is powered by a Google Spreadsheets form. And this one doesn't work. I get a nice generic error message, which leaves me totally in the dark as to what went wrong. Argh. (It did get fixed though; see update below.)
Until it's working (I'll speculate why it's borked in just a moment), I'll paste my additional info paragraph here, just as an example (who knows, you might want to use it as a template 
):
Initially I plan to just experiment with the service and see what it can do, but I think I might come up with a brilliant idea to actually use it for real as part of one of the sites I manage. http://www.swrobotics.com/ comes to mind as another possible site where I'd use it.
So anyway, why might this Google sign-up form not be working?
Since it's based on a Google Spreadsheet, it's bound by the limitations of the platform. Spreadsheets are limited (only one thread of many) to 10,000 rows, and with the publicity this launch got it's completely believable that 10,000 developers already applied. This is the price for Google eating its own dog food (so to speak). I guess in a way it's a good thing that they don't give themselves superpowers in their own services.
Meanwhile, I can't sign up for the waiting list. Oh well, it's not like I'd get immediate access anyway. Being locked out has increased my interest, too, so perhaps using a limited submission system was a calculated move on Google's part to generate even more desire to sign up. Who knows? It's working on me.
Anyone who gets in on it, please let me know what the interface is like from the inside. I'll probably post again if and when I gain access myself, but advance knowledge would be nice to have. (Yes, I will be watching Google blogs, official and unofficial, for more info as well.)
Use Cases
Meanwhile, I can brainstorm. This site already has social features (comments), but perhaps I'd like to do more. A sidebar game or something. Perhaps not, but you get the idea.
The Southwest Robotics website might have a comments area added where people can chat about the team's efforts or robots in general. There's definite potential in that idea. I'll have to take it up with my teammates.
Other than those few examples, I'm sure there a vast number of gadgets that I don't know about yet. Only getting into the service will allow me to really see what's possible. Stay tuned for more opinions as I can generate them.
Update (05/14): OK, the form is working again. It's also been completely changed; the number of fields has at least doubled. So much for just copying and pasting what I tried to send in yesterday.
[Google Friend Connect logo from the Google site, displayed under a Fair Use claim; error screenshot taken myself, site design and imagery copyright Google, also Fair Use claim]
Profile Duplication Equals Time Wasted
With the explosion of social sites, Internet users can be asked to fill out, and keep updated, dozens of profiles all over the Web. For light surfers, who use maybe three sites (say, Digg, Twitter, and Facebook), keeping things up-to-date is simple. There are only three forms sites (Facebook has a bunch of different pages for its profiles) to visit when something changes.
People like me, however, end up amassing a whole bunch of pages to update. Right now I think I'm somewhere between 25 and 50 profiles, plus countless sites and profiles-that-aren't-for-sites that I am no doubt forgetting. That's a lot of places to go if I, say, move myself or my blog (for instance). And inevitably, several pages would be overlooked and the information staled. (Don't tell me I'm the only one; I'll bet Robert Scoble, Steven Hodson, Louis Gray, and countless other "social media gurus" all have the same problem.)
This applies to location, "homepage," "blog," etc., image, interests, and any other bit of information (including short blurbs like Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, etc. provide space for) shared in a social profile. What am I to do if I want to change something? Remember every single site I signed up for? Madness! Searching for my nickname doesn't help completely, because some profiles just don't make it into Google.
The time required to figure out the list of sites that need updating, then actually updating them, then figuring out the ones that were overlooked, then most likely forgetting about some that were already updated and going there again only to find that to be the case... Well, I won't calculate it. It's a lot. I know; I just changed avatars not too long ago.
That's one of the things that put this issue in my mind. I'd been using the same graphic for so long, I couldn't even remember where it had been uploaded. I probably still left some sites with my old avatar, but how am I to remember them all? Only time will help me find them and fix the image.
Really, though, none of this should be necessary. The fact that the disparate profiles are hard to update is only part of the problem. Entering redundant information takes up time, too. Putting in my email address, blog URL, nickname, location, and any other data requested by the site should only have to be done once, and I think there's already a way for that to happen. It's just that not very many places support it yet.
Unless I am mistaken, OpenID authentication has profile data built in. Name, email address, location, phone number, address, picture, and all that jazz are stored in one's OpenID profile (unless, like me, you have Blogger, in which case I have no idea what's available). So why don't we leverage this capability? More sites should be supporting OpenID anyway, because it's just more convenient for everybody.
Correct me if I'm completely wrong and OpenID doesn't support profile data. I'm almost positive I saw profile management available from one of the other providers I tried (actually, I'm still trying to get that account deleted; I never used it and the site is semi-broken). But I could be remembering incorrectly.
If I'm right, though, still let me know. Confirmation makes me happy, frankly, and I'd love to hear your ideas for expanding or improving upon my little idea here. (I'm not even sure it's original; someone else has surely come up with this obvious solution before.) Thoughts?
Blogger Gets OpenID Controls!
I logged into Blogger early this morning to write my post for the day and was prowling around in the Settings panels trying to find an option to turn on enclosure fields (in case I ever decide I want to do a podcast episode or two, you know). Lo and behold, I saw a new tab, labeled OpenID! Here's what was on it:
I remember the Blogger in Draft team promising to add a feature to manage authorized websites back when the OpenID provisioning was turned on. Looks like they did it!
Yes, I know, I'm getting excited by a new tab. Big deal, right? Wrong! Until now, clicking the "Yes, Always" button on the OpenID authorization screen sent that site to a black hole of URLs that was irretrievable, and impossible to alter by removing something (sites could be added to the list, but not removed). Now you can remove a site's authorization to always confirm that you own your blog address.
To the Blogger development team: Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! 
Blogger Blogrolls and Bugfixes
In the last couple days, Google's Blogger team added a new sidebar widget to Blogger In Draft for testing. It's a "Blog List", in essence a blogroll. It displays a list of blogs, and optionally titles of each blog's latest post, snippets of the latest post, and how long it's been since each blog was updated. Users can add sites either manually or by importing from Google Reader subscriptions.
In other news, a list of bugfixes and enhancements were added to mainstream Blogger, including fixes for the label counts bugs (which I have never suffered from, AFAIK) and comment pagination for posts with more than 200 comments. The post editor now loads faster, the "Template" tab for dynamically served blogs (the ones that don't require republishing) is now the "Layout" tab, and the comment form now highlights identity options more clearly.
So, my take on all this is next.
First off, let me say that I want the comment pagination to be optional. Comment pagination drives me crazy on sites like Lifehacker, and comment-tracking services like Co.mments.com can't deal with paginated comments. I would like to see Google add options to 1) adjust the pagination threshold and 2) turn pagination on and off both for the whole blog and for a specific post.
Next, I'd like to comment on the Blog List widget. I tried it last night, and couldn't get it to save after importing my Google Reader list. That explains why I don't have one of those widgets yet; I couldn't get it to work. It would make my sidebar unbearably long anyway.
Finally, the improvements to the comment form, post editor loading time, and the labeling of the template/layout tab are all welcome improvements. Blogger's starting to shape up and become a little more powerful. Now all I want is the ability to create static pages a la WordPress. An integration between Google Page Creator (or whatever they're working on to replace it) and Blogger would be absolutely wonderful.
Update (02/29): There were a couple bugs with renaming and caching in the Blog List feature when it was first released; they are both now fixed.
Blogger as OpenID Provider
Hot on the heels of last month's release of OpenID commenting, Blogger is now testing support for using blog URLs as OpenID logins. Now not only can other people log in with their OpenIDs from elsewhere, but Blogger users can use their Blogger blog URLs as OpenIDs to log into other sites. I have now deleted the delegation code from my template (which has been working for a while; I just never updated my previous post), as I enabled the beta feature from Blogger in Draft. For now, it's only available from Draft, through a checkbox on the Edit Profile page (rather than in the blog control panel), but Google will probably push it through to everyone by the end of the month.
There are a couple things missing at the moment, like revoking trust from a site you choose to trust "Yes, Always", but it's nearly feature-complete. I'm switching to it. Now I probably won't care as much about Yahoo!'s upcoming OpenID support, but oh well. If Blogger's integrating it, why should I care about Yahoo!'s effort? Granted, that's a large user base they have, and it will probably lift OpenID into the public view, but for my purposes it's useless now.
Yahoo! Launching OpenID?
PC World says Yahoo! is testing OpenID support. I'd say, from the evidence presented (the content of the domain https://me.yahoo.com/, for example), that they're probably right. The page title is currently "OpenID Provider 2.0 -- User's page", with "The user's OpenID provider is https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth" in the body. It seems primed to have nice, simple identity URLs like https://me.yahoo.com/voyagerfan5761. Of course, I delegate my OpenID from this domain (the delegation meta tags redirect requests to AOL), so a simple configuration change on my end can get me using Yahoo!'s system. And when Google eventually support OpenID from Blogger URLs natively (which would be a natural extension of the OpenID commenting launched last month), I can just remove the delegation tags (unless I like my current provider better, in which case I shouldn't have to touch anything).
As more major providers support OpenID, I think that will be a great impetus to start supporting OpenID logins in more places. I certainly hope this Yahoo! thing is true; I'd really like to use them instead of AOL.
Oh, before I go sort pictures from tonight's robotics club meeting, let me say more about the evidence. Aside from the above-mentioned domains, there is also code on Flickr.com photostream pages that would allow users to login with their Flickr identity elsewhere. The code is: <link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth" /> I hope this is formally launched soon; PC World couldn't reach Yahoo! for a comment, but given all this already-placed code, it seems unlikely that they'd abandon the project now. I can't wait!
Update (01/17): About a week later, there's been an official announcement. Yahoo! OpenID support goes into public beta on January 30, 2008. Looks like they'll be using the Yahoo! homepage as everyone's identity URL, though. Boo! In that case, I'll stick with AOL. But things can change a lot in two weeks... Never mind that. After I found the press release, I saw that users can use a personalized URL at me.yahoo.com or just type in "www.yahoo.com" or "www.flickr.com". So I'll probably be able to delegate after all. Phew!
OpenID Commenting Released from Draft
Two weeks later, Blogger's OpenID comment tests are over. The feature has been released to all Blogger blogs. They've also fixed handling of URLs with "www" in them, added OpenID comments to post pages, instead of just on comment.g, and added a Blogger favicon to Google Account/Blogger Account comments.
Now all they need to add is the ability to use Blog*Spot URLs as OpenIDs themselves, and we'll be set. I can't wait to ditch the AOL delegation I put in my blog's header, which is broken anyway.
Blogger Testing OpenID Comments
You might notice a change in the comment form for this blog and others. That's because Blogger in Draft has launched a test of OpenID commenting, and I've opted in. That means that if you have an account somewhere like AOL/AIM, LiveJournal, TypeKey, Wordpress, or any other OpenID provider (Technorati, for example), you can use that identity to comment.
Also in the works is support to use Blogger blog URLs as OpenID-compatible identities elsewhere, both Blog*Spot and custom domains. I'm excited about this part, as I really don't want to be using my AIM screenname as an identity, but I really don't have many other options at the moment. I don't use AIM much at all, and am looking forward to the Blogger team enabling OpenID login with my own blog URL. This site isn't likely to go anywhere, so using it as my identity would be quite nice.
Social Me
Badges
Subscription Options
Latest Comments
- Voyagerfan5761 on “No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences
- dogbonz on “No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences
- Voyagerfan5761 on “No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences
Latest Posts
Archives
Categories
Creations
Southwest High Robotics Team My first non-personal design work
Promotions, Causes, Etc.
- Yes, it's a shameless plug for money. A strange thing coming from me, but it supports one of the Web's greatest sites.
- I'm sure you saw this one coming. You know what I want.
- Set yourself up with OpenDNS, the fastest DNS service around! You can also set up shortcuts for frequently visited sites and filter content.
- Download the best multi-protocol IM client I've ever seen! So it crashes once in a while, but it's in active development, so they're definitely working on it. (And really, what program doesn't crash once in a while?)
- Don't let Microsoft push through a redundant, broken standard for office files! Chaos and confusion could ensue!
- This is just in case spam-bots visit this site. Click it to find out more (it only does bad things to email harvesters, don't worry).
Blogged.com says I have to leave its badge here to claim ownership of this site. I can't take it off, apparently. Whatever. What would be nice is linking to my own site's page rather than generic "technology news" listings...
blogarama and Blog Flux have similar, but implied, issues. And why does everyone link me to a generic listing page?!