Mike calls it a massive win for the project and I agree - OpenID just scored bigtime when Yahoo! opened openid.yahoo.com this morning. If you don’t know what OpenID is, check the OpenID homepage at Openid.net, but for the non-technical people, Openid is a decentralized authentication system that allows you to share login credentials across multiple sites (in theory, this could be any website, in the future). Actually, Yahoo! has a great explanation:

Are you tired of creating a new account on every web site you use? Do you avoid new web sites because they come with yet another username and password? Do you paste stickies with password hints all over your computer monitor?

OpenID is an open technology standard that solves all of these problems. The OpenID technology will allow you to use your Yahoo! account to sign in to hundreds of web sites! And this list is growing every day…

So Yahoo! officially joins the ever-growing list of Openid providers - honestly, I can’t see how players like Google won’t follow this move as well. OpenID makes sense both from a user experience perspective (at least to keep users from having to remember login and password for their websites) as well as a portability and security perspective. Since you can effectively “carry” your personal identity between providers and transparently change providers if you think you can’t trust your current one, it puts control into the hands of the users - which is definitely something we need more of.

So if you’re on Techmeme or follow a few people on Twitter you probably know that Scoble’s account was deleted from Facebook for using an automated contact information script by Plaxo. Mike says that Plaxo’s wrong here by violating Facebook’s TOS and scraping data into their own system. Robert says (after being naively caught red-handed) that data should be free (he arrives late in the data portability game, but better late than never). Both of them have good points:

1) Plaxo was wrong in building a script that clearly goes against Facebook’s TOS. Despite the “good intentions” they might have by allowing their users to import data into Outlook from other systems, it’s still a clear violation.

2) Data should be free whenever possible and legal. If I’ve created content on a service and added value to it by doing so (posting photos on flickr, updating my status on twitter, videos on youtube or building my social graph on facebook), I should be able to get my data out. Not necessarily wipe it from the service itself (although that’s something I should be allowed) but at the very least export it in some meaningful format.

3) Facebook is wrong too for not allowing people to copy or move data out. It also feels a little odd that I can import GMail contacts into Facebook but can’t move anything out. People aren’t allowed to delete their facebook accounts either, so it does seem like once you’re in, you and your data are locked. Sometimes I wonder what facebook would be without mass.

John Furrier says 2008 will be the year of trust, and I’ve written about it a couple of weeks ago too. A lot of these problems need to be solved, and hopefully we’ll continue moving towards open systems and open data. But now, now we just need Facebook to change their data and privacy policy. First Beacon, now this.

Wow, is this the start of a good year, or what? Zed Shaw threw down the gauntlet on New Years Eve by posting a huge rant about Rails and some of the consulting companies who work with the framework. Personally, I loved it. I loved it because a lot of it is actually true. You may know we work almost exclusively with rails on our development projects, so Zed was talking (screaming, rather) quite close to our hearts. Here’s some of the things he talks about and that I agree with:

1) Some people (he generalizes a bit further) working with rails are morons. That would be true for just about any other language, but you know how it gets - people working with new stuff consider themselves special (a snowflake, I’d add to paraphrase DHH) and act as pricks. It’s human nature and it just happens. Luckily there’s some stellar people working with (and on) the framework too.

2) Great talent is usually not appreciated - although it’s a real pain to hire good rails developers. Some clients don’t fully appreciate the value of working with someone who does the work, does it right and actually knows the space he’s working on. But just as there’s bad clients (people who are looking for the quick turnaround and the quick buck), there’s some lousy programmers.

3) I giggled when he mentioned that Basecamp had to be restarted 400 times a day (once every 4 minutes), particularly because the framework’s performance was often backed by rails community. Being totally honest, we never actually had an application that had to be restarted at any given interval, but hey, if it is true what he says about BC, it would be ironic to say the least.

I’ll add a couple of points about things that piss me off about the Rails ecosystem (not necessarily the framework itself): Hosting providers, conferences, the books.

1) Hosting providers: rails is the “new” kid on the blog, so every hosting provider who wants to be hip has to support it - problem is most of them suck badly. We worked with a few companies to know the scenery, and to be honest, the only one we’ve dealt with that has people who knew their way around the framework is EngineYard (interestingly, Zed also praises Ezra in his post).

2) The conferences: well, I didn’t post much after Railsconf 2007, but the gist of it is: the conference was really poor. Between consultancies selling their own services and speakers who knew little about what they were talking about, I’d say the entrance money was definitely not worth what we got out of it.

3) The books: clients and friends who are interested in the framework sometimes ask about our recommendations for books - and time and time again I said there’s really none I’d recommend. In fact, if there’s a book I recommend for people willing to get into Ruby and Rails I’d start with the Ruby Way and ignore all the rails books. Current offerings from publishers are poor examples of programming language-focused writing.

Is it all bad?

Hell no. In fact, the good things compensate the bad. The framework does excel in quite a lot of areas; there is amazing talent working with and on Rails and there are good resources if you want to join the fun yourself. Rails is a great framework, we’ve had tons of success with our implementations (and others have too), and we’re happy. Some things, though, are not as good as some people claim they are - i.e. people selling you “enterprise knowledge” with no experience, or major consultancies who hire (or train) the wrong people to work with the framework.

Interestingly, Mike at Techcrunch picked up on this story as well. Disclosure: Techcrunch is a client for which we build rails-based solutions (like the Crunchies and the Presidential primaries). But no, we don’t restart anything every 4 minutes ;-)