Applications

Online address book site Plaxo seems to be serious about opening up its service and becoming one of the forward thinking sites on the web. Anyone remember the bold statement of Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr when Plaxo was announcing support for OpenID and microformats back in July? Well, a similar statement has been made today (or was it yesterday already?):

At Plaxo, we believe strongly that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their profiles and friends list. No service you use should claim your data as their own and keep it trapped in their “walled garden”. We will continue to publish tools and articles here and on our blog to empower users and support a truly open social web.

Online Identity Consolidor

So what has been the reason of this statement? Plaxo is introducing the Online Identity Consolidor. What sounds complicated is actually hardly more than one simple HTML tag *): rel=”me”. You just have to add a link of a site or profile which provides rel=”me” tags to the Online Identity Consolidor. It will crawl that site and will follow all rel=”me” links; then it looks for reciprocal links and verifies them. That’s some kind of proof that you control both sites or profiles. In order to give you a better idea I just quote Plaxo again:

For instance, anyone could link to my twitter page, but I won’t link back with rel=”me” to any of those sites except my own home page. So if my home page links to my twitter page and vice versa, you can be sure they’re both really my pages. Similarly, if my twitter page links to my home page, my home page links to my Plaxo profile, and my Plaxo profile links to my twitter page, I’ve still established a trusted circle of links, even if no two pages link to each other in both directions.

Below is a short excerpt of the results page of my ClaimID profile. The output format is text; XML and JSON are also available.

Users can add profile sites to Plaxo Pulse and make them public; rel=”me” will be attached and the sites will be available in users’ public profile. Those profile are some fine hCards, by the way. Though Plaxo takes this one step further. The source code of the Online Identity Consolidor is available for download! It’s a Python script; so if you can make use of it and maybe even improve it, go for it.

I think this is really cool, though if Plaxo used MicroID some sites could be verified more easily. On the other hand if everyone added rel=”me” to links about themselves this approach would work rather well to claim ownership of websites and profiles. Should I replace the Wink widget with a blogroll about myself? It’s so easy to add rel=”me” on WordPress blogs.

*) Update: This (and the title as well) should be proof that I don’t know anything about tech, programming,… rel is not a tag, it is an attribute. Hell, even I should know this.

German event calendar Wevent has announced today that it is looking for a new name. The reason is quite simple: there is another company called Wevent in the US which has launched just recently and is also focusing on events. Both services’ names just differ in their top level domains; Germany’s Wevent has an .org domain while the US service has a .com one.

German Wevent launched first and has established itself as a viable alternative to Upcoming in Germany. It has great features, a growing community, and two very dedicated developers who are very helpful whenever a problem occurs. However in order to prevent any confusion and possible legal hassle with Wevent in the US the name will be changed.

I really like the name because it is a good description of what the service is about. So I will certainly miss it. Though I can see why the developers want to change the name. They are both students and probably can’t afford a lawsuit when push comes to shove.

Australian task manager Remember The Milk is offering pro accounts to its users now; they are moderately priced at $25/year. Though besides priority support by email there are not any additional features available for pro account users at the moment and the service remains free with all the features you know and like anyway. Though you can tell the developers what you’d like to see in Remember The Milk.

Offering pro accounts with no real additional value might seem strange, bold or even audacious to some people. However I think Remember The Milk has become an awesome service since its launch about two years ago. You probably won’t find many services which provide so many well thought-out features and remain free over such a long time. Also there are no ads or other nasty obstacles which interfere with your productivity. I think signing up for a pro account is just a little sign of appreciation of long time users to the two developers - Emily Boyd and Omar Kilani - for their great work and dedication. And if nothing else it gives

A warm fuzzy feeling knowing that Bob is adequately nourished [with bananas]

Just have a look at Bob T. Monkey yourself.

According to a blog post today online calendar application 30 Boxes has passed 300,000 registered users. That’s really an impressive number for a small company like 30 Boxes. What’s interesting about the number is that most users registered with it after it launched its Facebook application in July. While the number of unique visitors has increased before already Facebook provided a significant boost (see the Compete chart). Facebook has some positive effects on other companies it seems.