Two days into the new Presidential administration, Barack Obama issued a memo calling on the still unfilled new office of Chief Technology Officer to make a list of recommendations for an Open Government Directive. The recommendations are due within 120 days of that memo, which called for "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." What would you like to see on the list of recommendations?
This morning the highly effective nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation launched a new microsite called Our Open Government List, where anyone can make suggestions for government transparency and all of us can vote on our favorite ideas. It's like Digg for steps to open up public data.
Yahoo application platform leader Sam Pullara has been appointed Chief Technologist, the company announced internally yesterday. Pullara has been responsible for the widely loved Yahoo Pipes and the next generation Yahoo Query Language, sometimes referred to as "Pipes for the command line."
Pullara is a leader in Yahoo's work on Open Web standards and the open web community appears enthusiastic about his promotion at Yahoo! For full coverage of the move, see our write up on Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's blog covering new hires in tech and new media.
After a period of dramatic tension, social networking giant Facebook has joined forces with the OpenID community working for a distributed system of standards-based, non-proprietary user identity. It's a move we think bodes well for the web and yesterday the first big collaborative event was held since the union was announced. Facebook hosted an OpenID User Experience Summit at its headquarters in downtown Palo Alto.
Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.
Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.
So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.
Today was a big day for portable social network data. Both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connection became available for any 3rd party website to interact with Facebook and Google users and their data. We've got our concerns about these kinds of initiatives coming from big companies (see our earlier coverage comparing Facebook Connect to OpenID) but it's also exciting to imagine what kinds of possibilities programs like this will enable.
The folks over at advertising firm Razorfish put together an interesting slide deck today illustrating what kinds of things would be possible if Amazon and iTunes were to implement Facebook Connect. It's a very good jumping off point for conversation about the possibilities in general, so we've embedded it below.
Do you think that open standards, data portability and questions of online identity are important? We do; we think these issues are the foundation upon which many of the most exciting and important online innovations are being built.
That's only going to be more true in the future, so if you'd like to have a say in how it all goes down - now's the time to get involved. The OpenID Foundation is one of the leading organizations in the new standards world and it's having its first ever election of community board members this month. Nominations close Monday and the voting begins on Wednesday.
This summer MySpace announced that it would implement OpenID and a number of new user data hooks for developers to build mashups with. That announcement was made in July and there's been no MySpace OpenID seen in the wild...until now.
As pointed out by intrepid explorer of the interwebs Chris Messina, there's now live code for OpenID authentication inside every MySpace user's profile. View the source on yours and you'll see it. This should be more than just single sign-on, too.
If cookies were the multi-billion dollar magic for much of the web's first iteration, tiny technologies to power conversation could play a similar role in the future of business online. More fun than that, though, is the innovation we hope to see in the technology of conversation.
Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.
The Mozilla Foundation announced this morning that it has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian and the Ajax Experience, to run a new Developer Tools Lab aimed to make Open Web development easier and more powerful. The term Open Web refers to a paradigm in which data and users can move easily from one standards-based application to the next, without being hindered by proprietary technology or vendors hording user data.
Note-taking and Optical Character Recognition service Evernote may not have a whole lot of users yet, but the users it does have absolutely love it. There's a whole lot more to love, and more reasons to use Evernote, with a slew of announcements the company made today.
Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.
