Charmian's Journal

Kind of following my previous post on OpenID:

I was reading Chris Messina (one of the people behind DiSO (which is basically a project about making social networking/media distributed, instead of centralized)'s blog, and he had some things to say about the openID's flaws on the user experience level.

In April, he talked about how openID is confusing to the technically un-inclined. The problem, as he sees it, is that openID is simply confusing users because there is too much choice. I agree that the openID logo also really doesn't help matters because people don't know what it is.

Later, he makes another post on usability issues, about 'designing for the gut'. Basically, he's saying that users demand simplicity in login, and engineers and designers cannot afford to ignore this, even if it isn't the most technically powerful solution. Simplicity wins.

Other DiSO related links:

Also, DiSO is working on Activity Streams, which is a way of standardizing data produced by various social networks. The format has already been adopted by Facebook, MSN, and many other popular sites.

Recently, Cliqset created a way to convert many feeds into the Activity Streams format. It "enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces."

Chris Messina on My Name is not an URL

Namespace squatting?

However, at the same time, there seems to be another trend: the increasing dominance of Facebook in the identity field. (Which may not be a contradictory one: FB seems involved in some of these Activity Streams projects)

Yahoo recently announced they were going to increasingly integrate Facebook data into their services, and now, Myspace is rumored to have an extensive FB integration in the works. It looks like Myspace wishes to have access to the FB social graphs. Looks like the war is going to be Google v. Facebook now. XD

I'm wondering what this is going to do to the smaller blogging/publishing sites. So far Twitter seems to be somewhat aligned with Google, but that could change in the future. Microsoft is a FB investor, so they may start doing more things with them. Hard to say what's going to happen in the next year, but it may be an exciting one.

(Post in question here)

As for my speculations, I'll save them for another post, but my suspicion is that it's not about what 'what LJ did' or 'what happened on LJ', but 'what LJ didn't do' and 'what happened outside of LJ.'

Anyway, here's an interesting article about Myspace's decline.