WhistlinDixie

Facebook Reinvents the Wheel

At the annual Facebook developers conference (they even have one?), it was announced that Facebook would add support for an OpenID-like service, called Connect, that would allow Facebook users to use their logins to login to websites such as Digg and Six Apart. The key phrase here is OpenID-like. This is not OpenID, nor will it likely work with it. Rather, it is a proprietary system that a small group of websites are using to share logins with eachother.

A few years ago, before OpenID was anything more that a project at Six Apart, I would have applauded these websites for putting forth the effort to share logins amongst each other. These days, however, we have OpenID, which is seeing greater adoption as time goes on. Big names are already on board with OpenID: Yahoo, MySpace (intentionally unlinked), AOL (includes AIM), Six Apart, WordPress, and Blogger, to name a few. VeriSign and MyOpenID are some of the many entities that are OpenID providers only, and add to the usefulness of the ecosystem.

Facebook and the other parties that are part of Connect are hurting the OpenID community by starting up their own, incompatible identification sharing service. There is no cost to OpenID other than the time to get it set up to work with your infrastructure. So, why are they creating their own service? Even stranger is the fact that Six Apart, the creators of OpenID, are one of the parties that is working with Facebook on this new protocol. Why is Six Apart undermining their own child? It will be interesting to see this play out.

EDIT: Just ran across another article about Connect. I guess Connect is more than just an identity provider. Still, I do not like the fact that Facebook traps all of their data inside their walls.

Annoyances

You would never think that a wireless internet connection would be the biggest pain in an apartment that is in a hotel-like complex. It has been for me. The access point that I am closest to is not connected to the internet for some reason or another. There are plenty of access points that work just fine, but they have weaker signals than the non-functioning one. To get connected to a working access point, I have to unplug my laptop and carry it out into the hallway, where it can pick up a good signal. Then, I can carry it back into my room. Then I hope that the connection stays strong enough that my laptop will not connect to the bad access point again. My arm is starting to get tired, so I hope that it doesn’t happen again.

In other news, I now know that I have friends. Last time I checked, I have 20 friends. What really surprised me was how many people have invited me to be their friend only a day after I joined the FaceBook community. Thanks.

Spreading my Wings

Guess what? Kettering finally joined FaceBook! I wasted no time in getting a basic entry on there. I’ll flesh it out later. BTW, please, be my friend, because it is lonely to see the friends page empty. (Je n’ai pas d’amis.)

Also, I am searching for a free server where I can try to recreate my web page the way that I had envisioned it from the beginning. I’ll notify you if I decide to move, but it will be a while before I reach that point since I’ll have to learn PHP first. If it does work out, maintenance will be a lot easier for me, and it will result in smaller downloads for you.