For many of us, the thought of not having to create new usernames and passwords evokes images of the heavens parting and angels trumpeting.

One of the major talking points at last week’s Future of Web Apps Conference was OpenID – in fact Kevin Rose of digg.com announced at the conference that they are planning to adopt it.  Microsoft and AOL have both already announced their support.

I was going to do a write up to explain why OpenID gaining traction could herald the next semi-revolution, but over at the AOL developer network they’ve written an excellent article called OpenID and the Value of Connected Identity. In summary:

• OpenID allows you to securely log in to a website without having to create a new username or password.
• You can keep your identity information in the place you choose without trusting the next random start-up with your password – you can even run your own server.
• There’s no need to worry about your preferred login name not being available – it’s a URL so it is always uniquely your identity - eg http://claimID.com/paullomax.

And just to prove it’s going to go mainstream, The Times Online also has a write-up – although their strap includes a word that is almost the antithesis of OpenID [my emphasis] :

Companies are competing to introduce a single, secure login that would work for all bank accounts, shopping sites and other web activities.

I think OpenID really does have a future, particularly once it goes to 2.0 which promises to solve a few of the potential issues such as phishing and generally making the whole system a bit easier from a user perspective.

Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

Common themes and approaches in successful online communities

Common themes and approaches in successful online communities

• Keeping the dialogue going
• Personal use – eat your own dog food
• Involved personally in customer support (see craigslist)
  • Flickr greeted each new user

if you don’t know anybody at a party then you leave.” – Christine.net

• Experimental approach
  • ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if…’
  • Flickr started as a game, with the photo sharing as a side product
• The Power of Word of Mouth
  • Build-in ways to share – blog, rss, cut and paste URLs
  • Participants are media creators – blog, irc, wiki etc [threadless.com]
  • Instead of adding more features, add more ‘on-ramps’
  • Sms, email, jabber, web-based
  • Involve community in decisions
• Listen and be flexible
  • Let them create content
  • Put the audience in charge [see barcamp.com]
• Simple platforms to build on
  • Google maps vs Yahoo maps (55% of mashups on programmableweb vs 5%)
  • Create building blocks – tools, resources, techniques
  • Extendable – eg wordpresso
  • API – eg flickro
  • One function – twitter
• Community rewards
  • Flickr: free pro accounts, anniversary parties, schwag
  • Twitter: featured members, blogging
  • Threadless: share the revenue
  • Barcamp: give more privileges to the leaders

Setting fertile ground for your own community

Motivation [John Coate quote] – “A benefit that makes a difference to their lives”

Create a sense of community:

1. Feeling of membership
   • Creation of boundaries
   • Emotional safety
   • Eg Personal profile pages, ‘friending’, defining groups, invites
   • Personal and group self expression
   • [Seeing a lot of audience verticals eg mayasmom.com]
   • Greet new members, like flickr
2. Feeling of influence
   • Voice heard
   • Learning
   • Feedback responsiveness
   • Rule enforcement
   • Forum, chat, comments, blogging, email
   • Platform for expression
3. Integration and fulfilment of needs
   • Support from others
   • Status, expertise
   • Shared values
   • Feeling of competence
4. Hierarchy of needs (Maslow)
   • Physiological
   • Security / safety
   • Social
   • Self-esteem / ego
   • Self-actualisation
   • Eg Karma points, featured members, status rewards

• Users should form a shared emotional connection
  • Discrete / shared events / history / crisis
  • Offline needs

Above all else when building a community you need patience

Edwin Aoki (AOL)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

• Email and IM becoming biggest online (web-based) app
  • See AOL IM on People.com
• Community based
  • Obvious: Blogging, boards, social networking
  • But also non-obvious: Reference (wikipedia), auction (ebay), commerce (threadless)
  • It’s not that new – webrings are old school
• ‘Disaggregation’ and syndication
  • Portal / destination site is dead.. [interesting point given AOL’s new position as a destination content site?]
  • People visit highly tailored and focused sites (long tail)
• The opportunity is to make things embeddable and mashable

Mention: pitch.mobi – social networking for mobile

Second life – “people are spending a lot of time online”

We have shared responsibilities

• Safe, effective
  • Most people don’t care about security, privacy, spam, social effect
• Decentralisation disrupts trust model
• Accessibility
  • Visually, audibly or motion impaired
  • Older generation
  • Different socio-economic groups
• Balance, between:
  • Power and ease of use
  • Social benefit and commercial interests
  • On and offline interaction

Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

Key factors of success for start-ups

1. Have a good idea
   • Invent a market (digg)
   • Destroy a market (eg craigslist)
   • Remove friction (eg youtube, skype) – eg cost, tech
2. Have a business plan
   • (But be prepared to throw it out…)
3. Have a revenue model
   • Youtube was burning $1m a month on bandwidth…
   • Myspace was making $25m a month before google deal
4. Build it cheap, test the water
   • Research is bad? [Maybe if you have an early adopter audience...]
5. Avoid high burn rates
   • Stay hungry!

AIME.ST – digg for music, price varies by popularity, defined by downloads

• Solve a real problem
• You must (as founders, devs, etc) blog
• Create buzz – and if you can’t, then rethink your product (not your marketing)

Opportunities in 2007

1. Offline / Online
   • Adobe Apollo lets you create offline apps using html, ajax, etc
   • Firefox 3.0 is rumoured to include offline capabilities
   • Websites that access the filesystem
2. DRM for music/tv/movies
   • Anybody who can crack this has it made
   • Joost is working on it
3. Data and service portability
   • Teqlo, Ning, Pipes
4. Mobile
   • Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect at AOL and Chris(?) Wiles, Product Manager at Google agree