Yahoo

Web Finger! moving out into world

Kaliya Young · August 14, 2009 · 1 Comment

I love the Internet Identity Workshop! it is where innovative ideas are hatched, answers to hard problems are vetted and standards consensus emerges. This is just the latest in amazing collaborations that have emerged.

Web Finger was covered on Tech Crunch today with this headline – Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

At IIW in May they had a session lead by John Panzer. The notes were not filled out that much but (All the Notes from IIW)

but there is a white board of their conversation and a link to what google had up.

Chris Messina spliced it together

XRD the discovery protocol is part of how Web Finger works. This spun out of XRI.

Techcrunch didn’t explicitly pick up on the fact that Eran Hammer-Lahev has been a key collaborator and is at Yahoo! (they did link to the mailing list where he is posting). He has been really driving XRD forward lately.

All exciting stuff.

Personal Anchor on the Web for Digital Identity – CC Images

Kaliya Young · June 16, 2009 · 2 Comments

I got a request for the images I posted in “Personal Anchors on the Web for Digital Identity” from David Larlet to use in a slide presentation in France. I decided to open them up and post them here.
Below are versions with english text and a version without english text.
[Read more…] about Personal Anchor on the Web for Digital Identity – CC Images

Congress Targets Social Network sites – to be blocked from Schools and Libraries

Kaliya Young · May 11, 2006 · Leave a Comment

WOW this is really intense.
The freedom to meet and organize is FUNDAMENTAL to what it means to be a citizen in this country.
This was in slashdot headlines and is quite shocking.

MySpace and other social-networking sites like LiveJournal.com and Facebook are the potential targets for a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the category’s most ardent users.
High Impact
What’s new:
A proposed federal law would effectively require schools and libraries to render social networking sites inaccessible to minors.
Bottom line:
Law would likely affect more than just social networking sites. Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo’s instant messaging features might be included in proposal’s definition.
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“When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned,” Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNET News.com in an interview.
Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.
That’s a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google’s Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo’s instant-messaging features, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat.
Fitzpatrick’s bill, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA, is part of a new, poll-driven effort by Republicans to address topics that they view as important to suburban voters. Republican pollster John McLaughlin polled 22 suburban districts and presented his research at a retreat earlier this year. Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, is co-sponsoring the measure.
The group, which is calling itself the “Suburban Caucus,” convened a press conference on Wednesday to announce new legislation it hopes will rally conservative supporters–and prevent the Democrats from retaking the House of Representatives during the November mid-term election.

Where is the Valley's political power?

Kaliya Young · April 28, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I have been wondering about this for a while. Where is the companies in the Valley’s political might? and where is the political organizing amongst the people who work in this industry? In Europe the geeks organized to get the European parliament to ban software patents. It seems like it should be easy enough to organize to save the internet. I am going to do my part and organize Planetwork’s activities around One Web Day.
This was articulated by Marc Evans on his blog:

The Net Neutrality campaign (a.k.a. Save the Internet) to keep the Internet tollgate-free and/or tier-free continues to gain momentum. What’s troubling, however, is Om Malik’s contention that many start-ups and Silicon Valley companies and fairly of the issue and why it matters. One of the Silicon Valley’s weaknesses is a lack of political savviness. Sure, many companies and executives donate money to politicians and political parties but there does not seem to be a well-organized and effective lobbying team that can be turned on in Washington when needed. Peter Chester suggests a reason for the lack of activity among the bigger players such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft is they have relationship with carriers and cablecos that they don’t want to damage.

Where is the Valley's political power?

Kaliya Young · April 27, 2006 · Leave a Comment

The Net Neutrality campaign (a.k.a. Save the Internet) to keep the Internet tollgate-free and/or tier-free continues to gain momentum. What’s troubling, however, is Om Malik’s contention that many start-ups and Silicon Valley companies and fairly of the issue and why it matters. One of the Silicon Valley’s weaknesses is a lack of political savviness. Sure, many companies and executives donate money to politicians and political parties but there does not seem to be a well-organized and effective lobbying team that can be turned on in Washington when needed. Peter Chester suggests a reason for the lack of activity among the bigger players such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft is they have relationship with carriers and cablecos that they don’t want to damage.

What is the map of the challenge? Usability and Web Authentication

Kaliya Young · March 20, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Last week for two days I was at the W3C workshop on usability and authentication. It was hosted at the top of a citibank building in Brooklyn. We had to present ID at the door to get upstairs.
The room was a very long rectangle room with three presentation screens and 2 giant columns. It is a terrible lay out. The first morning we heard 3 ppt presentations about ‘the problems’ of for usable security and authentication. Maybe people are 1/2 present doing e-mail and other things.
I really wanted to interactively (as in facilitated face to face discussion) create a map of the problem space. By the end of two days I sort of got it but I know we as a room could have come up with that in 1/2 a day and then sent the rest of the time really working on ideas for solutions.
There are a bunch of constituencies.
Browsers – Firefox, Opera and IE (Microsoft)
Big websites – AOL, Yahoo, Google.
Certificate Authorities – Verisign
Banks
They all want security of verifying websites to be more usable and understandable to normal folks. So there was usability experts.
I think I understand why ‘standards bodies’ and processes get bogged down. They are really not very innovative in their face to face technology – presentations for a two days do not create a positive energetic vortex and community to move forward on solving problems.
I am really tuned into this need to get better at our face to face process so our ideas and innovations for the online world can actually work.

Down with Buddy lists….

Kaliya Young · January 26, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Mobile Jones …

Jazz, an application that provides audio messaging to yet another circle of friends. More invites….more buddy lists….

There were so many identity silos at the etel.
Each phone handset has one for address books –

Motorola,
Nokia

Telecom Incumbents

Orange(france telecom),
British Telecom

Cool “apps”

YackPack
Jazz

The Incumbent internet players

ebay/Paypal/skype [PESk]
Yahoo!
Google (using Jabber)
Microsoft

Who is that Person? Firefox extension

Kaliya Young · January 25, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I just found out about this Firefox extension by Ted Rheingold of Dogster Fame called who is that person.

I posted my first Firefox extension. It’s called ‘Whois This Person’ and it’s a simple little right-click menu item which will query any name you’ve highlighted against LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Technorati, GoogleNews, Yahoo Person Search, TailRank as well as some family and address sites. It’s not gonna change the world, but it may save some seconds here and there.

After you confirm who you are, you may log in.

Kaliya Young · January 24, 2006 · Leave a Comment

This is the message that I got today when I logged into a new collaborative atlas site Platial.

Thank you, we have sent you an email to confirm you are you. After you confirm who you are, you may log in.

All sending you an e-mail and clicking on a link does is prove that you own that e-mail address.
User-centric services have for UUID’s (universally Unique identifier) linked to real people. I had a conversation with one of the lead technical people on this project and they are in a bit of a bind without being able to access third party identity servers. They don’t want to ask people for their login to Yahoo, MSN, Flickr etc. but services like Mobido do this and (young) people give them to use.
There now doubt in my mind there is a market need for these services.

Technorati Tags: identity, geolocation, UUID

Marc on the Open Web

Kaliya Young · October 3, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Marc Canter’s AlwaysOn article finally is out. Breaking the Web Wide Open!

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Webâ€”it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs. But like it or not, those walls are tumbling down. Open web standards are being adopted so widely, with such value and impact, that the web giantsâ€”Amazon, AOL, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahooâ€”are facing the difficult decision of opening up to what they don’t control.

Identity is the first topic covered and he does a great job summarizing:

Right now, you don’t really control your own online identity. At the core of just about every online piece of software is a membership system. Some systems allow you to browse a site anonymouslyâ€”but unless you register with the site you can’t do things like search for an article, post a comment, buy something, or review it. The problem is that each and every site has its own membership system. So you constantly have to register with new systems, which cannot share dataâ€”even you’d want them to. By establishing a “single sign-on” standard, disparate sites can allow users to freely move from site to site, and let them control the movement of their personal profile data, as well as any other data they’ve created.
Identity 2.0 is all about users controlling their own profile data and becoming their own agents. This way the users themselves, rather than other intermediaries, will profit from their ID info. Once developers start offering single sign-on to their users, and users have trusted places to store their dataâ€”which respect the limits and provide access controls over that data, users will be able to access personalized services which will understand and use their personal data.
The Initiatives:â€¨Right now, Identity 2.0 is under construction through various efforts from Microsoft (the “InfoCard” component built into the Vista operating system and its “Identity Metasystem”), Sxip Identity, Identity Commons, Liberty Alliance, LID (NetMesh’s Lightweight ID), and SixApart’s OpenID.â€¨â€¨More Movers and Shakers:â€¨Identity Commons and Kaliya Hamlin, Sxip Identity and Dick Hardt, the Identity Gang and Doc Searls, Microsoft’s Kim Cameron, Craig Burton, Phil Windley, and Brad Fitzpatrick, to name a few.