AOL Opening 30 new sites

I am going to be very interested in the 30 sites AOL brings up in 2008. Will it be a case of "Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width" or will we see some innovation? Certainly the Top100 Videos widget, built using Air is getting a positive reception from people like Robert Scoble. So may be theange from the past.re is a chance of seeing quality over quantity. Over the past 2 years AOL has been carving an open path. This is a massive change from the past but in some ways it is a return to their roots. After all AOL used to have a tremendous community sharing content on boards inside the AOL walled garden. I think the real test of the 30 new sites will be around how they encourage and leverage indigenous (or user generated) content. Is pixnay the first sampling of this strategy? I took a quick look and was disappointed to see no OpenID support when logging in to Pixnay.

Blogging with courage

Susan Mernit's blog is always on my must read list. Her latest post on "Blogging with courage, aka losing the habit of holding back" really struck a chord with me. You see, I write a daily blog for AOL. It appears internally  at 2.open.aol.com and I also work for a Health Care company, CareFirst.  The two roles give me a fascinating insight. My challenge is always to find ways to cross-pollinate ideas.

At CareFirst I get involved with IT Strategy and see the potential to revolutionize how we engage with our customers if we adopt some of the tools and techniques from the Web 2.0 world. This will not happen unless change is forced. It is too easy to sit back and depend upon the tried and trusted methods. We have to be brave and experiment.  

I have been coming to the realization that as bloggers, I believe we have a duty to share a little piece of ourselves when we write. That is why Robert Scoble is such a compelling read as well. 

So, Susan, thanks for bringing these thoughts in to focus for me. I can't stay quiet if I want to see change happen. I have a duty to voice my opinion, share my ideas and encourage change. 

I am also one of the people that have joined the Data Portability work group. I have been a big advocate of OpenID since the early days and was delighted when AOL took the step to OpenID enable every AIM screen name.  What really attracted me to the Data Portability work group  is the potential for it to change the implementation of the Personal Health Record (PHR) for the better. The PHR is of vital importance to each of us. Its importance will grow as more of our health is monitored and recorded electronically. It absolutely should be something we as individuals control. The PHR is bigger than any one company, even Google or Microsoft. I firmly believe that Data Portability is part of the PHR solution.  The mechanisms promoted in Data Portability provide the basis for us each to control who can access what parts of our PHR.

Use Blogger as your OpenID address

I was reading about Google supporting OpenID for commenting on blogs and remembered about OpenID delegation. It got me thinking. May be we can get ahead of the curve with Google support of OpenID. So a quick Google and a debt of thanks to Phil Windley on his Technometria blog and I had what I needed to start using this blog as my OpenID. If you want to be able to use your blog as your OpenID then follow these steps below.

The steps documented here are for Blogger but you can follow this procedure with any blog platform. All you need to be able to do is to be able to insert a couple of lines of HTML in to your blog. This procedure assumes you already have an OpenID. I have been using my AOL Instant Messenger account as my OpenID. If you have an AIM account then you are one of 62 million screennames with an OpenID. 

Okay, here we go:

1. Login to Blogger and access your blog dashboard.
2. If you have more than one blog pick the one you want and select the Layout option.



3. In layout mode choose the Edit HTML option.
4. Look near the top of your template
5. For an AOL AIM OpenID use the following snippet of code, just be careful not to embed this in one of the many comment sections of the Template:

/*
Add OpenID Support to Blogger using AIM
*/
<link rel="openid.server" href="https://api.screenname.aol.com/auth/openidServer" >
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.aol.com/YourAIMScreenNameGoesHere" >
/*
End of Add OpenID Support to Blogger using AIM
*/

6. Save your template.

Yes, Put your own screenname where it says YourAIMScreenNameGoesHere

Go to a site that accepts OpenID. 

Use your blog address as your OpenID. You should be taken to the AIM Screenname sign in.

That's all there is to it. Your blog is now your userid and password! One less URL to remember.

Open Social and meebo

Last week Google launched Open Social together with a slew of Social Networks and Social Application developers. Are you holding your breath to see how this takes off? Creating platforms is the name of the game. meebo recently launched their own platform to integrate third party applications inside meebo. One of the fascinating partners with meebo is Tokbox. Tokbox provides flash-based video mail and video calling. The potential to provide cross-platform video calling is a compelling offering and one that none of the major desktop IM players are addressing. Yahoo and AOL can video between PC and Mac platforms but it is not possible to video beween services. If Tokbox cracks this challenge they will have a hit on their hands. On the Open Social front I am waiting to see if meebo is going to join Open Social. The ability to provide IM between social networks in a seamless manner, together with TokBox providing video chat, could be just the boost Open Social needs. meebo is a compelling platform, their user stats are impressive with growth in user numbers continuing to grow and the average daily stay of each user is lengthy. Of course meebo has an opportunity to flip the information flow with Open Social and this may be an attractive route to take. An increasing number of companies are blocking traffic to the major social networks like MySpace and Facebook. meebo is not typically blocked, may be because it still flies under the radar in comparison to the popular social network sites. However, if these sites are blocked but could be accessed through the application platform that meebo has built this could make meebo an even more significant player. So meebo - are we going to see support for Open Social and the delivery of MySpace and other Social Network data inside meebo?

iPhone and the case of two-fingered enlightenment

For some time now I have been writing a blog that is circulated internally at AOL - 2.Open.aol.com. A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I could also contribute to dev.aol.com. Boy has that move paid off! Let me explain. On June 29th, My wife bought me an iPhone. It is a fantastic device. I love it! I had proclaimed it, months ago, to be the defacto standard for mobile access for Web 2.0 applications. It has lived up to that billing. But we have been finding limitations. One of the applications missing from the iPhone at launch was a chat application. iChat was conspicuously missing. This has led to rapid development of third party web-based chat applications. One of the developers on the dev.aol.com developer network produced Tiny Buddy IM. I also immediately tried one of my favourite chat applications, meebo. Both worked but had a flaw. The same flaw also appeared when I tried to use the iPhone to input a wordpress blog posting. The issue is that a scrollable list that appears inside a web page does not have a scroll bar and there is no obvious way to scroll down the list. The application appears broken. I was wrong, but it took one of the members of the AOL developers network to reveal the secret. Thanks JRBSilver! He revealed the secret. Typical of Apple, they have embedded a subtle richness to their user interface. It lies there hidden to be discovered. Any iPhone user has learnt to flick around web pages with a finger and to pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out. Well, if you encounter a scrollable list inside a web page you can scroll it by placing two fingers together and moving the list. So the rule is one finger to scroll the page and two fingers to scroll a sub-section of a page. I suppose it is entirely logical when you think about it. This discovery means I can scroll my list of buddies. Now I just need meebo to fix the selection of an item in that scrollable list. Unless of course Apple have already programmed a specific jesture for that and we just haven't discovered it yet! So it is good news. The following applications benefit from this discovery:

• meebo
• tybyim
• Wordpress

I am sure I will discover more that benefit from this gesture, but if you find them first drop a comment below and I can add them to this list.