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.

What a difference a small change makes. Gmail launched what has probably been my #1 wanted feature since I’ve started using it: colored labels. Labels were useful already if you wanted to archive content meaningfully, but without a visual cue their impact on the inbox wasn’t really significant.

Colored labels however, make a huge difference. If you’re smart about the way you use labels, you can create a system for your email to prioritize conversations, organize a task list, or go all out and build a proper GTD system out of it - all with the visual cues of colored labels, because they allow you to at a glance understand what email belongs where without reading the subject or even the label text.

What to take away from this

Minor differences like these visual cues are some of the things that define application experiences, and frequently (and unfortunately) are forgotten by developers and people building products. Products that are meant to help people manage assets in their daily life in particular deserve this special caring eye on them.

People building web applications need to ask themselves “How can I provide meaningful cues to help my users?”. These things (like the need for cues) are not found by chance - people do express the need for cues and helping paths all the time, we just need to care enough to listen and make changes.

It’s kept us awake the last couple of days until ungodly hours, but it’s now live. The Crunchies is an awards ceremony co-hosted by GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch, meant to celebrate internet technology and innovation. You can nominate companies for awards in 20 categories, and out of those nominations, 5 candidates are picked for voting on each category. Then in January 2008, a ceremony in the San Francisco Herbst Theatre will award the best of the best.

In the last few days our team built the infrastructure for the crunchies, designed the brand for ceremony and sites and built the web applications to allow voting and nominating companies. Now we definitely need a couple of hours of rest. All in all, it’s been a good time working with the people at Techcrunch again.

Note: Want to participate by nominating a company? Visit the Crunchies weblog and the nomination page and vote away! You can catch more posts about the crunchies at the participating blogs: Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Techcrunch.

This one is going to be quick - your blog ads piss me off. I know we all read feeds every day, but every once in a while (like everyone on Techmeme, I’ll assume), we end up reading blogs in our browsers (you know, like in the old days) - and you know when that happens, because your head explodes. Why does it explode, I hear you ask? Because you are spoon-fed ads all the time. Let’s look at a couple of examples of what I call “blog as chrismas tree” (I’m so ticked by this, I’m actually coining terms).

Engadget: In green, white space or elements that although can’t be necessarily called content, are okay (or useful) to have. In orange, pieces of layout that are mildly distracting. In red, elements that are just there to cause retinal pain or to make the user go away and never come back. Engadget, above, isn’t so bad - it actually comes out with about 50% content over the fold. Let’s look at someone else:

Born Rich: Don’t be fooled by the green, ladies and gents, you’re looking at 9% content, 91% advertising or white space. I don’t know if these people were actually “born rich” as the blog name implies, but they’re sure trying with all those ads. Seriously, if 10% of useful screen real estate above the fold is all I’m going to get, I’m getting the hell out.

The blog as christmas tree plague

Monetize, monetize, monetize. We all want it, we all need it. But people, we’re getting ridiculous here. We’re shoving ads in front of our users, when all they care about is the stuff we actually write about. If you really want to get people to visit your site, do think about how much of your page is useful.

Eh, I’m just having a bad monday here. Don’t mind the grumpiness.. And I usually don’t do this, but I’d appreciate the eyeballs on this matter, so if you’re keen, digg this.