open source

Bill Gates sez M$ is gonna back OpenID. This is a good thing. Although you can be sure they’ll cock it up on some Windows product, OpenID is simple and well-enough-designed (ala other basic protocols like SMTP, HTTP, DNS, etc) that even if your fancy bells and whistles suck ass, the basic protocol still functions well, and other people will make better products, and progress marches on.

Honestly, I don’t think M$ can break OpenID, and I think having them on board may finally break the logjam. Get used to seeing this:

Learn more, if you like. But the jist of this is that you will soon be able to house multiple social internet logins under one roof, meaning you can pick someone you trust and use that login everywhere without compromising your security. For instance, you could use your AIM login info for most other places you need to “identify yourself” online, without compromising your AOL account. It also means it’s easier for people like me to cut back on comment-spam. Woo!

Those are immediate benefits. The addition of a true distributed identity layer to the internet has much more revolutionary potential as well, but we’ll have to see how things play out for a few more years before any of that happens.

Tresler points me to Joi Ito talking about Six Apart’s new joint, Vox. It’s a good name for a good product, and a nice logical next step between typepad and livejournal (which they bought).

But I like the name “Rebel Unicorn” better.

Basically my take is that the future is not in having some magic technology that lets you run a huge site that everyone uses. That’s why the myspace and youtube buys don’t seem like good moves to me: the functionality can and will be replicated 100 times over, so all you’re buying is the community. Google may have a chance at holding that, but Fox is almost guaranteed to fuck it up over the next five years.

Not that myspace will evaporate, but it will cease to be the phenomena that it is, and just become a national “scene” site for emo kids. You might as well have bought makeoutclub.com, Rupert.

Where the future is at is in running a more modest site (or if you’re not modest, a site that lets people run sites) which actually serves a real community, but which can interoperate. The future is in enabling a network of social websites, not in running some kind of monolith.

I’ll write about this and how it wiil happen on my work blog soon.