Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Infoworld reports this morning that Yahoo appears close to becoming an identity provider for OpenID.  This, of course, is the next step in a full implementation.  You can already use OpenID to log into Yahoo properties like Flickr, for instance.

I've been using OpenID as a single sign-on for a while, for sites that allow it, via the OpenID plug-in for WordPress.  It's a valuable and useful tool, hampered by the fact that there simply isn't enough support for it.  With additional support from Yahoo, it looks as if momentum might be shifting finally.

Yesterday was a pretty exciting day on the privacy and data portability front.  I didn't have any inkling of what was coming up next after publishing the Privacy Manifesto on GigaOm, but shortly after Plaxo, Facebook and Google all joined the Data Portability working group.  That's great news, and I myself have committed to the organizers of the group to start to work some of the Privacy Manifesto into the Data Portability group's documents.

The reaction to the Privacy Manifesto was quite polarized.  On the one hand, groups of people already familiar with it's principles (primarily Chief Privacy Officers at various corporations, and Europeans and Canadians) came out in support of it.  At the other end of the spectrum, those who still view individuals personal information as a corporate asset argued that it would be complex and difficult to implement.  And in the middle of it all, Robert Scoble, the agent provocateur who set the stage for the whole discussion with his attempts to scrape data from Facebook, continued to challenge the various viewpoints.

Some of the reactions worth reading:

• The comment stream at GigaOm
• Michael Geist's quick posting last night.  For those who don't know Geist, he's one of the top privacy guys in the world, and the chair of the University of Ottawa's law school in Internet and ECommerce law.  He's also the advisor that we turned to at iotum when we needed help, two years ago, with our own privacy initiatives.
• Thomas Otter also weighed into the mix with a European view, and a comment stream ensued even longer than the stream at GigaOm.

So, what next?  The proof's in the pudding.  As I mentioned last night to a friend on Facebook, companies join standards organizations for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it's to move a collaborative effort forward, sometimes it's to keep a finger on what others are doing in the industry, and in rare cases it's to disrupt the standards process.  What counts now is not that Google, Plaxo and Facebook have joined the process, but rather the result that the process can achieve.

John Sculley touted his OpenFrame phone at CES yesterday, positioning it as the iPhone for the home phoneline.  It's a nice looking phone no doubt, and he says he's lining up carriers for distribution.

I have my doubts it will succeed.

1. High end phones for home have never sold that well.  When I was part of the Windows CE group at Microsoft we built one of these devices in the late 1990's.  Codenamed Hermes, it sported a touch screen, address book, internet connectivity and more.  The bill of materials costs for the phone put it out of the reach of the average consumer, so we cancelled the project.  Most every other phone like it since has been canned for the same reasons.
2. The landline is a dying beast.  All the trends today point to mobile phones as the phones of the future.

Speaking as a dinosaur who still owns a land line, and a gadget freak, I might buy one of your phones John.  There's probably a few more folks like me out there too.  Just don't expect mainstream America to be snapping these up.