Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID, Huh?

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

by Erick Schonfeld on October 29, 2008

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo...

Ed: I don’t get OpenID. The RP still needs an account per user; and adds the burden to manage an alias list with multiple alias per user. The friction is higher for the user and developer. Why?

Most sites cache login information as cookies. As long as you visit once every 3 months. The login is there. Further, browsers track userid and password by site.

Is OpenID a solution in search of a problem?

Or is it a trojan horse to share information among websites. If it’s the latter, it invades personal privacy.

Can someone explain this to me?

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

How to Get the Feeds

All the other major search engines make it really easy to grab a feed for any web search, but Google is probably concerned about spammers finding bizarre and unscrupulous uses for their feeds. We're all inconvenienced as a result.

To get a feed for a Google search you have to go to the web page for Google Alerts and set up an alert for your search. You can enter most queries here. including site: queries. (site:http://readwriteweb.com semantic for example.) You should select "web" instead of the default "comprehensive" if you're just interested in tracking web search results.

"Feed" isn't an option in the initial drop down menu of delivery options, you've got to select email first. After you've done that, look at your collection of alerts and click to edit the one you want by RSS. At this point "feed" is an option in the drop down menu. Select it and you'll be shown an RSS URL. Throw that puppy in your favorite feed reader and you're ready to rock and roll.

The feed will deliver any new links that show up in the top 20 search results for your query. That's pretty limited, but most people don't look beyond the first 20 results anyway. That means that this is good for high-level reputation tracking but not very good for discovery of new, more obscure pages of interest.

The RSS URLs that Google gives you are based on an arbitrary number and don't contain the text characters of your query. That means you can't build more feeds by simply editing the URLs, you have to go back in through Alerts and repeat the proccess for every feed of interest.

More Advanced Options

Here's how we're using the new Google search feeds. We've grabbed feed URLs for searches for A. our names, B. our company name, C. our company URL and (just for fun) one for each of those three items without the other two. For example: "Richard MacManus" -readwriteweb -http://readwriteweb.com.

That gave us a small pile of feeds, which we then ran through our favorite RSS splicing and deduplication service (we used Yahoo Pipes but if you're not comfortable with Pipes then Feed.informer.com is really easy to use). We spliced all these feeds together, filtered for duplicates and then threw the resulting feed into our highest priority feed reading system.

Now we can track our high level reputations constantly, without being paranoid about it. We might do this for concept searches as well so that if someone new starts ranking really high for topics we specialize in (semantic web, RSS) then we'll know about them and never look ignorant at parties.

If we were interested in getting an RSS feed for Google web search for discovery, more than just reputation tracking, we might do an "advanced search," increase the results displayed from 10 to 100 and then use Dapper.net to scrape a feed of results from that page.

All of this is more complicated than it ought to be, but once you set up even the most basic feed options then you don't have to think about it again. Though it isn't perfect, we do appreciate Google making these feeds available.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Lead Global Initiave for Free Expression

Official Google Blog: New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative.

Participants

The following organizations are participating in the Global Network Initiative. If you are interested in becoming a participant, please contact us.

• Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
  
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Boston Common Asset Management
• Calvert Group
• Center for Democracy & Technology
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• Domini Social Investments LLC
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• F&C Asset Management
• Google Inc.
• Human Rights First
• Human Rights in China
• Human Rights Watch
• International Business Leaders Forum
• Internews
  
• KLD Research & Analytics, Inc.
  
• Microsoft Corp.
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong
  
• Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen
  
• Trillium Asset Management
• United Nations Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Business & Human Rights(observer status)
• University of California, Berkeley School of Information
• World Press Freedom Committee
• Yahoo! Inc.