Life is grand

There has been plenty of buzz lately about OpenID. I think the idea is very good even though its flexibility (”decentralised”) can make getting your head around it a bit difficult. Once you figure it out though you realise how obvious it is.

Up till now though my main problem with OpenID has been getting my domain, paulmwatson.com, to be my OpenID. I want to login to your system with paulmwatson.com as my ID, username, etc. I once tried to install the server software but that went nowhere and I left it.

Thankfully Simon Willison wrote How to turn your blog into an OpenID which uses a simple (for us techies) meta tag in your HTML to redirect through to an OpenID provider. So I signed up with MyOpenID which is my identity provider but I tell OpenID accepting sites to use paulmwatson.com which routes through to MyOpenID. As Simon points out if I stop trusting MyOpenID or find a better provider all I have to do is change the meta tags and all my dependant services carry on working using paulmwatson.com.

Very nice. Thanks Simon, and thanks for OpenID.

In a previous post I showed how to use non-conventional tables in your Rails app. A few days on from that and I have found two ActiveRecord model methods that make it even easier and better; set_primary_key and set_table_name.

This means I don’t even need to use any views as I was previously. Hurrah!

Ed Batista reported on Josh Porter’s Social Networks Are Killing Email to which I objected.

Obviously Josh was thinking further though as he came up with A Messaging Proxy and Domain as Identity. Interesting idea, I like it. Amazon’s SQS could potentially be a part of it and provide the reliability that is needed. I reckon it would need to be distributed too, having your messaging system go down due to a server fault or a company glitch would be a big problem. I also think we need to keep email in mind as we can learn a good deal from it as well as remember the vast amounts of archived messages many of us have and need to keep.

Google Checkout has launched and I like it. It is not a direct PayPal competitor as some suggested but instead provides a checkout system for online stores and central place to store payment and delivery details for shoppers. Effectively Amazon could outsource their checkout steps to Google. You could then use your Google Account to buy products from Amazon.

This idea has been floated before but the problem was one of reputation. Google though just may have the reputation to make the idea finally work.

Derek Lakin also made a good point about Froogle. With just one more component (an order-placing system from Google to the store) we could buy directly through Froogle without ever going to the stores website. Google would aggregate multiple store products, show them through the flexible Froogle interface and let you buy through Google Checkout. A common ecommerce interface.

UPDATE

And in another move Google has half-launched Google Account Authentication which is easily described as Microsoft Passport by Google. It isn’t quite the same and Google isn’t even saying it is (they say it is just for add-on functionality to their existing services like GCal and GMail) but you can be sure some sites will use it like Passport. IrishEyes broke the news to me.