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.

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 ;-)

It’s now been a while since Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0. Thousands of applications and services emerged since - however chances are you can only remember and name about 10. Truth is branding has been ignored by many of the entrepreneurs looking to launch their ideas - and many are paying for the mistake with slow adoption or failure.

Not everything can be generic, and a brand is one of the most important things to nail down when launching a product or service. If you’re still thinking of removing vowels from words to make up a 2.0-ey name, stop because you’re clearly doing it wrong. Here’s an example of how naming is a zoo these days. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post by Om Malik:

Earlier this year we wrote about Gaboogie, a web-based conference call service started by Erik Lagerway. The service didn’t quite work out, and the company reconfigured its business focus to offering instant group calls from mobiles, and is now called Lypp.

Another web-based conferencing service, Foonz might be going down that route. Randy Corke, CEO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications was in town last week to bring me up to speed on their new offering, Utterz, which is sort of like blogging-via-voice-calls from your cellphone.

Gaboogie is now called Lypp, and Foonz is launching Utterz. Are these people having a laugh? If I asked you to name the company with the golden arches, you’d probably say McDonalds; If I talked about the drink with the great bottle and the red brand, you’d likely say Coca-Cola; If I asked you about a web-based conferencing system, you would probably never remember Gaboogie, Lypp, Foonz or Utterz.

In contrast, I haven’t forgotten Joost’s pre-launch name “The Venice Project” (witty and smart) or “Jackson Fish Market” (weird and unexpected), a startup doing virtual gifts. Some will argue that once you hit critical mass how good a name is isn’t important, but it’s easy to make the argument that the name may have a huge impact on the growth itself - so please, do think about leaving those vowels in and give naming your new company more than 5 minutes of your time.

Edgeio has been up on Techcrunch twice in 2 weeks because it’s closing down and assets are being sold. Being one of the startups I have personally been involved with in the past (and the main reason why I lived in Silicon Valley for a while), I can’t help but feel sad about its demise. Mainly because the idea behind Edgeio was/is quite powerful.

The idea of aggregating content from the edge of the publishing network (blogs) into one place that parses what’s being said and makes sense of it (in this case, extracting items for sale) is quite powerful. If well executed, one can make the case that it would have an impact on websites like Ebay, where people have to sign-up to sell something.

Despite the idea being good, the company failed. The discussion at Techcrunch talks about fast money burning, too many expenses (which Mike hinted at in his deadpool post) and not being the right time for that particular idea. All of these may be right, although I’m not going to comment on the economics because when I left Edgeio, it was still just about to getting funded and had been bootstrapped until then.

Bubble or not (I’ve shared my opinion about that countless times and am honestly tired of the discussion), failure is necessary sometimes - even if only for the ecosystem to catch a breath. Shame failure struck people I care about.

Writing this post made me remember waking up at 8am PST over at Mike’s place to our almost daily product brainstorm meetings. I do miss those days - the people working on Edgeio then (I didn’t meet many of the new guys) were brilliant.