What does web 2.0 means to the users ?

This is one question which raises in my mind frequently these days. Every day there is a new startup and everyday the garage filled up with a new idea or a betterment sort. There is a truck load of information we can find across all the street corners of the web.

Has any one took hold of the market or does it need more time to evolve? Are we designing anything which centers society and social welfare? Do we really have time to explore new applications or are we wasting our valuable time before the PC.

One thing i could see is that there are lot of blogs made about many yet another web 2.0. How much the IT majors fund/invest on these startups? Does it open new IT oppurtunities? Does technology and application ideas flow parallel to complement each other?

How much time can we effectively(recommended) spend on a web 2.0 in an average? This question is irrelevant to the geeks or the developers. But it’s most relevant to the average consumer of the services of web 2.0.

There are more serious question waiting to be posted on these web 2.0 companies and service providers.

Broadband accounting

A post after a very long time. I was held up in my shifting of house from Chennai to Bangalore. I am happy that i managed to get the internet connection after 3 long weeks. I am happy about the reliance connection and the quality of service. Earlier i subscribed to tata indicom wireless internet unlimited download scheme but i that was not successful. Because there was no signal in my place or say the transceiver could make anything out of the air.

Then i took the advance back and tried reliance. It worked out pretty well and i am here now enjoying the service. I especially liked the accounting system. When we switch on the modem kind of device, it doesn’t take in to account for the service. This confusion i always had with airtel before. But reliance has made things quite straight forward. Only when i log into the system or network, i am accounted for the service. And another useful feature is the facility to monitor the plan and service usage which many providers dont provide. Esp. airtel made a big fuss out of this and they wanted us consumers to fill up a form. I never wanted to waste my energy to fill such forms. So i was reluctant with such a service earlier.

I hope my internet experice in the future will be in much more ease.

Openid, the License to get authenticated

Single signon vs[and] Openid

I use google, gmail, picasa web albums and orkut. Google helps me with visiting these places using my id which i obtained when i first registered for the free mail application

But can i use this id and password to login yahoo mail box (just in case)?

 No !!

Is there any solution to this problem ? 

I need to contact google or yahoo ?

Or call both for a meeting ?

Am i asking for trouble ?

Can i write a mail asking both the providers to support my openid ? ( one time payment, map my openid to the user id that is internal to google and yahoo)

Not able to decide! Ok, till then i shall remember my yahoo id/password and google id/password or note it somewhere in my diary.

So, what do i understand from this scenario ?

google and yahoo have their own authentication system. But atleast they made it reasonably sensible allowing me to use my id/password within their sub projects like picasa and orkut. 

I would term this as a centralized / single signon authentication system.

Different story now !

I use my preferred id/password/authentication system to
access free online radio
comment blogs
Post my doubts on forums (very less in list now)
and searching for places to use it

Little Flashback

Few months back
When i tried to register to a technical forum
saying i am so and so, kindly take up my registration and hit submit botton…….

oops!!
already someone else took the id.

May be you can these id’s

vish2008thisyear2009nextyear
vish2009nextyear2010yearafterthatyear
vish24age_maybe

(eek..! i lost the opportunity to  use my geeky id !). Oh not again.

Then i saw a small icon appearing in the corner of the login screen asking me to enter
some URL as a way to get authenticated.

 

When i read the help page, i understood that i can use my existing ixfree.wordpress.com URL as a way to get
authenticated to use the forum.

How nice !!

Back to the topic
I would like to term the above as a decentralized authentication system where my ixfree.wordpress.com is kind enough to work with www.sometechnicalsite.com/forum to authenticate me.

In short, the comparison between single sign-on and openid is like comparing centralized authentication system and de-centralized system. These two methodologies  have very less in common in my understanding.

Openid Authenticate/Authorize – Few clarifications

It’s common mistake that the two powerful words “authentication” and “authorization” used interchangeably.

The whole idea of openid is around the word Authentication. 

Why not authorization ?

This is a tricky question i believe. But it’s the simple answer which defines the whole concept of openid supported authentication.

One who uses openid is implicitely authorised(need not be all the times) to perform certain tasks and this rule is clearly managed by the openid relying party. So the word authorisation is very much specific to the projects and openid specification does not talk about it.

PS:- I have used the terms id and username interchangeably. I myself little confused with the usage of  the terms when I talk about login or sign-in (confusion again).

So I prefer to use the term id (openid in any case) in the future when I talk about my preffered de-centralized authentication system.

the openid in my perspective

I live the web

This is what most computer software programmers love to say.

As developers we are most likely to get help from the community which is very wide/huge in nature. It’s highly distributed. In most of the cases, the community is available to help us fix the bug. But there are few questions unanswered here and there. I would like to glide upon those points. I have just taken 3 points.

1. do i have legal power/access to visit and take help from without wasting time on registration ?

2. can i maintain my own identity across communities ?

3. can i choose my preferred/testable authentication mechanism ?

For all these questions(and much more hidden), i feel openid is a reasonably right answer. I prefer the word answer over the word solution because it’s not the only solution in the world
 but one among the very few answers.

the name says it all

It’s a methodology you choose to say who you are and how you are unique in this world

or

how you choose to present yourself accross communities

frustrated with registration

i see many web developers frustrated about the whole concept of registration. And they find hard to maintain their id’s accross forums.

What if his/her id is taken off by some other user (unknowingly ofcourse). Then he/she is forced to choose a new id which is most likely to be a <difficult to remember or not so catchy id>

time is precious
Ok. we are lucky enough to get a unique id at registration stage. what if we need to re-write (in most of the cases) our profile to get registrated to a forum which may/may not find us answers to our questions. How much time can we spend ? I see more scrollers than crawlers. Basically they are rightly impatient and  cant waste time with a long jsp page registering and waiting for the email from the admin.

More posts on OpenId coming soon. 

Compete with code ajax

It’s dynamic, flicker with rich set of data and considerably good response time with the XML text floating around. Almost all SOA based business framework talks this Java Script fundu language. It captivates any web developer.

In my experience with scripting languages i found the every thing interesting about dynamism. But all that with a cost. The need to take care of browser differences. The AJAX engine had to adjust itself at almost every line of differences. But it’s fun right through.

The HTTP is the carrier for all asynchronous request and responses. But should this XML/HTTP communication always be asynchronous ? I strongly believe not at all times. The way by which these xml, http and client side scripts are handled, the term AJAX takes synonymously polymorphic tenses.

Recently saw a notice inviting developers to try useful applications in AJAX way. The link here.

I find http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX docs useful to learn hands-on AJAX.