Not So Relevant

OAuth on Twitter Won’t Replace Your Brain

Carsten Pötter — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:01:09 +0000

Twitter has problems. Or Twitter users have problems. It depends on how you see things. Not only passwords were sold together with a Twitter application (see my recent post on the topic) but also users got phished and accounts of some celebrities got hacked. Really bad news!

Now people think Twitter needs some better authorization methods of third party applications and demand OAuth implementation. Even a website was launched: Please, Twitter, Implement OAuth Now!. Indeed OAuth is a solution and it’s great that more people feel the need for safer authorization. While it is a noble initiative, I feel a little bit uncomfortable when seeing some blind retweets of the message on Twitter. Basically, there are two reasons:

OAuth didn’t prevent the recent phishing and hacking attacks. To quote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone:

We plan to release a closed beta of the open authentication protocol, OAuth this month but it’s important to note that this would not have prevented a Phishing scam nor would it have prevented these accounts from being compromised. OAuth is something we can provide so that folks who use third party applications built on the Twitter API can access their data while protecting their account credentials.
While you could argue that Twitter somehow encouraged users to give away their passwords to third party sites, we should not forget that the users themselves helped their accounts being compromised. For convenience’s sake or a tiny features (by the way, did any of those people request those features from Twitter?) some self-proclaimed internet elite was happily passing their passwords to other sites. Not just once, but many times.

I am 100% pro-OAuth on Twitter but users have to think about what they do on the web and who they trust. OAuth on Twitter is just a small relief for users. There are other sites and other risks as well. Think!

OpenID: Successful in Japan

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:19:43 +0000

When talking or writing about technology and the web most of us have a very narrow view on what’s going on in the world. We only seem to notice what is happening in the Western hemisphere, sometimes even only focusing on the US. For example most people don’t know the biggest social networking sites in Asia and that some of them are even bigger than Facebook.

The same applies for OpenID. Mostly unnoticed from tech bogs OpenID has become quite popular in Japan. The OpenID Foundation Japan lists some fairly popular companies from all kinds of industries among its corporate members, a total of 41 members. Companies include: Oki, Hitachi, airline JAL, NEC, credit card company JCB, but also social networks like Mixi. While not all those companies have implemented OpenID yet, I think it is great to have support from such industry heavy-weights.

But not only industry support of OpenID is growing in Japan. Consumers know about and use OpenID. According to the chart below - lifted from a presentation by Nat Sakimura who is also a member of the OpenID Foundation Board - 28% of Japanese consumers know about OpenID and 15% are actually using it.

Consumer Adoption of OpenID in Japan

While adoption could be bigger, I think these numbers are quite impressive as they show a rapid growth (usage numbers for August are missing in the chart, though). Those numbers are also supported by another fairly interesting aspect: OpenID ranks number three of the biggest IT buzz words in Japan, higher than Firefox and Google Chrome.

Since Nat Sakimura is elected as a community member of the OpenID Foundation board, I hope he can help making OpenID successful in the rest of the world as well.

Your Passwords Are Sold. And Plaxo?

Carsten Pötter — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:27:51 +0000

It had to happen sooner or later and it’s just surprising that it did not happen earlier: Yesterday Twitter passwords were sold! Well, actually Twply was sold just after one day of operation for the ridiculous tiny sum of $1,200. Twply was a service sending @replies via email to Twitter users. And to do just this it demanded people’s Twitter usernames and passwords.

However Twply is not the only “service” that demanded people’s usernames and passwords. Services that extend Twitter’s functionality are especially notorious in that aspect. Other services want people’s Gmail passwords which might cause even more damage to users considering their AdSense data, emails, calendars, and what not are at stake. Users have to be educated that it’s definitely not in their best interest to give away their passwords to other web based services. There are alternatives available: Portable Contacts and OAuth. With those open standards services can access e.g. contacts data from other services without demanding passwords. Users are in full control of what’s happening and are able to revoke access at any time. This will be the end of the password anti-pattern described by Jeremy Keith.

Plaxo and the password anti-pattern

Plaxo has been championing open standards for a long time now. Its engineer Joseph Smarr is one of the driving forces behind Portable Contacts and other related standards and he is a really smart guy. Though what’s really disappointing about Plaxo is, that it continues to collect passwords for webmail clients:

password anti-pattern

Plaxo knows better but still demands passwords. Maybe Plaxo doesn’t store passwords but how many services claim the same? Users can’t control it. Though recently Plaxo’s head of marketing, John McCrea, sent an interesting tweet:

John McCrea on webmail clients

Well, this sounds cool. At first. But what he is really saying here is: Hey, as long as those big guys [he means Google, Yahoo!,...] don’t support the standard we want them to support, you have to give us your passwords.
Shouldn’t Plaxo explain to its most valuable asset, its users, that it no longer supports the password anti-pattern? One day Plaxo might switch to Portable Contacts and OAuth to import contacts but in the meantime it has educated its users to give away their passwords. Will it re-educate them? Wasn’t it easier to say that currently there is no convenient and secure way to import contacts but that Plaxo will work on it?

I singled out Plaxo here not because I hate the service but because I really like it. I want it to do better. But John McCrea’s statement is at least a little bit hypocritical.

Back

Carsten Pötter — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:23:48 +0000

by Zay_Kureshi

A few months have passed since I announced the end of this blog - well, a little bit prematurely as I have to admit now. Back in summer I was just sick of blogging, especially tech blogging, but I never really stopped reading blogs and tried to keep myself informed as much as I could without wasting too much time. The virus is still there, I guess.

So, what will change with this relaunch? I will focus more on everything “open” - OpenID, of course, the open web, the so called Open Stack, and everything else related to it. I wrote about those topics before and currently there is quite a lot happening in this realm, so it is probably consistent to write about it.
Music, football, and other off-topic stuff won’t get mentioned here anymore. Some people might regret this decision but I think it should be clear to readers what the blog is about. I have seen this blog being linked as a source for netaudio reviews. That is certainly misleading, even if I reviewed releases in the past but it wasn’t really a focus.

I would be very happy if some of the old regular readers were still around. It would be great to read some comments from familiar names. Nostalgia, you know. Though I don’t mind new readers as well. So, let’s see how this blog will shape but please, don’t expect a new post each day. I don’t want to put too much pressure onto myself. Also there are still some glitches with the new theme but hopefully I will be able to fix them rather soon.

Oh, I almost forgot: Happy New Year to all of you!

Three Months Blogging

The End

Carsten Pötter — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:14:36 +0000

by somethingcommon

I will keep this short: For the time being, this will be the last post on Not So Relevant. There are various reasons for stopping this blog. Over the last couple of weeks I tried to write them down several times but it did sound stupid each time.

So thanks a lot for stopping by, reading the articles - maybe you even found some useful information -, and some of you were even adventurous enough to subscribe to the feed. Much appreciated! The domain is paid for the next four years already, if I remember correctly, so the articles will still be up on the net for quite some time.

Bye.

P.S. Spread OpenID needs a new editor!

No related posts.

My Comments, Your Comments

Carsten Pötter — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:12:08 +0000

Everyone loves social media services and everyone loves data portability. Or at least, it seems so. My feed reader is chock full of articles on those topics (well, that simply means I read the wrong blogs or at least I have a very narrow view on what’s going on in technology these days, right?). The latest darlings of the early adopters and social media evangelists are FriendFeed and Disqus.

Fragmented Comments

If you don’t know already, FriendFeed is not only a lifestreaming service but users can comment on friends’ blog posts, Flickr photos, and other shared items in their lifestream. There is also a WordPress plugin available which shows comments from FriendFeed to the related posts on your blog. Disqus is a blog commenting system which aggregates all comments made by one user in a single place. While blog owners can run Disqus on their own blogs, comments are not part of the blog system, e.g. WordPress or Movable Type, anymore. So both systems allow people to comment on blog articles while the discussion doesn’t necessarily has to take place on the respected blogs.

So essentially comments can be spread over various and often disparate networks and services. Blog posts can be digged, stumbled upon, and mixxed. Other blog authors can send pingbacks and trackbacks and all those systems offer the opportunity to leave comments. If this happens to you as a blog author you have problems keeping track of the discussion which originated from your blog.

Who Owns the Comments?

So how does this relate to data portability? Well, over the last few days a discussion has emerged about who actually owns comments. If you comment on my blog, do I own the comment or do you own it? It’s my blog, but your ideas, thoughts, and words. Currently I am free to edit or even delete comments. And if I decide to delete an article all comments made on the article will be deleted as well. And if I discontinue the blog all comments will also disappear.

So are FriendFeed, Disqus and similar services a solution to preserve comments? Should they be portable from my blog to any system and service that can make use of them? My first thought was “Sure, I write the comment, I own it”. I still think it should be that way but does it make sense? Are comments worth anything if the original post is deleted? Hardly. Who could ever understand what you were referring to? Also if every commenter could edit or delete their comments at will (because they own them) conversations could become pointless. Commenter B refers to commenter A, but later commenter A deletes their comment. Bye, bye discussion.

While I am an advocate of data portability, the question of ownership of comments shows that not everything we wish and hope for will really work in reality. I really like FriendFeed a lot (more than I initially thought I would) and haven’t made a final decison on Disqus yet. Also I don’t have any problems if comments appear on various services but I don’t think it makes sense that comments are owned by commenters.

What’s your stance on this? Do you know any other scenarios where data portability doesn’t make sense?

New Look

Carsten Pötter — Mon, 26 May 2008 06:44:57 +0000

Eventually I updated my WordPress installation over the weekend. I am always hesitant updating it because I usually do something stupid and it ends in a mess. Yeah right, I’m an expert in technology. But it was about time for the update. I was still running version 2.1.2 and the growing number of reports about WordPress blogs being hacked made me quite nervous, to say the least. However, in the end updating was a breeze.

People visiting the blog will notice a new theme (the old one is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1). It’s very clean and the sidebar is clearly separated from the content. I made some minor changes to it like adding xFolk, hAtom, and hCard microformats to the loop and changing colors of headings and links. It’s also possible to comment with OpenID now. So if you have one, use it please. OpenID comments are whitelisted - until spammers use it, of course.

Unfortunately special characters like German umlauts got messed up but I only corrected them on the last few articles. If you notice any other glitches, please report them. Thanks!

No Competition in the German Tech Blogosphere Anymore

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:04:58 +0000

Since last week there is one less excellent German tech blog to read: Martin Weigert of zweinull.cc is writing for netzwertig.com now and is quitting his own blog. zweinull.cc was one of the very few serious tech blogs in this country which was started only 14 months ago and quickly gained popularity and acceptance among the more tech savvy crowd. It’s probably fair to describe it as a German Read/Write Web, i.e. tech news without copying press releases and a healthy dose of opinion. It was certainly a must read blog and will be missed.

Some people might argue that Martin is writing for another blog - netzwertig.com - now and nothing will change. That’s good, isn’t it? Well, I am not sure. netzwertig.com just launched one month ago. It belongs to Swiss blog network Blogwerk and is run by Andreas Göldi, Marcel Weiß, and Markus Spath. The three guys are well-known in the German speaking blogosphere because of their own blogs. They are certainly three respected voices. Andreas Göldi ran Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz, writing about the convergence of media and (internet) technology. His blog was also part of Blogwerk. Marcel Weiß is still running neunetz.com, a blog similar to zweinull.de but with stronger opinion. While the aforementioned guys are probably fairly unknown to readers abroad, Markus Spath should also be known in the English speaking blogosphere. Besides running his own blogs live.hackr and Museum of Modern Betas, he was also writing for the German edition of Blognation.

Now Martin is joining them and suddenly netzwertig.com is THE tech blog here. While some smaller blogs cover similar topics - Thomas Frütel’s Webmaster Blog comes to mind - there is no real competition to it anymore. Marcel has reduced his posting frequence on neunetz.com already and Markus’ blogs are focused slightly different. Don’t get me wrong (it’s my week of negativity anyway), I like netzwertig.com a lot so far but I am wondering if it’s really healthy for the blogosphere here. It will be more difficult for smaller blogs to gain similar acceptance because netzwertig.com has all the attention and admittedly the competence.

This Week’s Bookmarks

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:59:42 +0000

A quick summary of some sites and articles I have enjoyed reading this week.

The OpenID mobile experience, part II | FactoryCity

Great suggestions on how OpenID authentication could work for mobile sites. Also worth reading is the comment by Allen Tom.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Some Thoughts on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace Data Availability

Dare Obasanjo on data portability and social networking interoperability

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Good Laugh This Morning

Carsten Pötter — Sat, 24 May 2008 06:59:44 +0000

Allen Stern on Center Networks:

Ancient civilizations used the sun to determine what time it is, Apple fanboys use their iPhone. Me, I use Twitter to tell what time it is! That’s right, with their daily outages from nearly exactly 6-7pm Eastern, if it’s down and the sun is up, it’s 6pm.

Apple’s Next Products