Bloglines Makes Announcements, Including OpenID Support
Bloglines, the IAC owned online feed reader, made a number of different announcements this morning - most importantly that the company now supports OpenID. At least it is starting to support OpenID, more on the details below.
By some accounts Bloglines is the market leader in online feed readers - by others it trails behind Google Reader. Regardless, the company has been a key innovator in the space for some time and the product is widely used. We reviewed the most recent major overhaul of Bloglines in August.
As of today Bloglines users can use their Bloglines login info to sign in to other sites that support OpenID login. This is good news, but more than a bit underwhelming at the same time. Big companies can announce all day long that they will now let you log in to other sites with their ID - it's time for them to support OpenID login on their own site using credentials from other vendors. Bloglines' GM Eric Engleman told me this morning that Bloglines will do just that in early November. Let's hold them to it.
In the mean time, Engleman said he was excited to be able to log into sites like the new Plaxo and social bookmarking service Magnolia using his Bloglines OpenID. Readers interested in a good pros and cons article on OpenID should check out Wendy Boswell's excellent post on LifeHacker last month.
The company also made a nod towards other standards it said it was looking into, including oAuth and APML, Attention Profiling Mark-up Language. If Bloglines does meaningfully implement support for either of these standards, it could be a huge event for their communities of advocates.
You can read more about the Bloglines announcements, which also include new mobile features and more granular control over feed display settings, on the company's blog. OpenID info is hidden away at http://id.bloglines.com/ where no one but geeks will find it and the company will get credit accordingly. Let's see them put their money where their mouths are in November and let new users log in to Bloglines using their AIM screen names, Wordpress.com credentials, MyOpenID.com accounts and more.
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I would only appreciate bloglines if they allow us to login with our existing openID. Making bloglines ID as an openID is a way to keep their users connected to bloglines even when they visit other sites. The real adoption of openID will only happen when bloglines allows us to login using our openID. Waiting for November to see if it happens.
On an unrelated note, I think you should get Richard to allow openID on RWW.
Hey Krish, thanks for your comment. You'd better believe we're discussing OpenID support here at RWW :)
Marshall: as the technical director for VeriSign OpenID provider I wanted to second your comment when you said:
"Let's see them put their money where there mouths are in November and let new users log in to Bloglines using their..."
and extend the list to include "VeriSign PiP accounts"
Thanks.
Marshall: as the technical director for VeriSign OpenID provider I wanted to second you comment when you said:
"Let's see them put their money where there mouths are in November and let new users log in to Bloglines using their..."
and extend the list to include "VeriSign PiP accounts"
Thanks.
Thanks for stopping by Gary! Glad to see another vendor in this space speak publicly about the situation.
Since, we just launched OpenID Publisher Support, we're now moving onto releasing consuming OpenIDs in Bloglines. Perhaps we'll beat RWW to the punch and have both support for the OpenID Publisher and Consumer by November. ;-)
But seriously, we should challenge everyone who has a top 100* blog, to implement OpenID by the beginning of November. The standard has gotten a lot of momentum recently. Let's keep it going.
*(use Technorati or Techmeme or whatever to measure the top 100)
Excellent post Marshall, if anyone is having issues implementing OpenID they can always talk to the JanRain OpenID developers who live on Pibb (https://pibb.com/go/openiddevelopment or https://pibb.com/go/openid). There is also an #OpenID channel on Freenode.
These are great moves by Bloglines and Eric in particular - he's shaking things up and really helping Bloglines move to the next level - well done Eric!
More thoughts on the APML support here:
http://www.particls.com/blog/2007/10/bloglines-announces-support-for-apml.html
This is great news and good job!
Simpy recently added support for OpenID (see http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/news/2007/09/12/Simpy-Release-OpenID-and-Profile-Monsters.html ), so I've been paying attention to its usage and observing top OpenID providers, and so on. Orange recently announced OpenID support and I already see some Orange users in Simpy, so now I'll be looking for Bloglines OpenID users, too!
Eric, well said. It is time for all the top 100 bloggers to have openID implemented.
On a different note, has anyone developed a service where I can track all the comments I make on blogs that support openID?
I love OpenID and can't wait for it to be supported throughout the web. There is also a nice review here