Massive OpenID Adoption

Simon Willison openID fowa

Simon Willison, openID founder evangelist, gave an exciting presentation at the Future of Web Apps yesterday. OpenID is an open source login standard that is getting viral adoption. Simon expressed surprise at the number of services taking openID in the last three weeks; AOL, Symantec and Microsoft. That is a hundred million subscribers just there. Bill Gates’ endorsement must be any viral marketers dream influencer. Specially with Bill Gates’ strong pro-identity (senderID) work in the anti-spam community.

I find the openID whitelisting for spam elimination the most exciting. Finally, a viable mechanism to eliminate email and comment spam. OpenID finally adds one of the key pieces to the online reputation
mechanism. This in turn fills a big hole in building communities online.

There remains Google’s endorsement

Data Feed Standards Conflict Looming Between Google, Amazon and Shopping.com

The National Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has embarked on the Unified Data Feed Standard Project. The standard aims to unify the data feed templates used by all the shopping comparator sites.

froogle

yahoo Shopping

shopping.com

kelkoo

The problem is that merchants looking to be included in these engines need to handcraft a data feed of product information and price for each shopping portal. The work adds a considerable overhead since each of the shopping portals has a widely different template for the data feeds.

But an overview of the data feed standards at Amazon and Google Base shows each has considerable investment in disparate systems. Unifying data feed standards will require considerable investment, and disruption of current partners and affiliate networks for all shopping portals, and price comparators.

In the mean time, many merchants are currently opting to outsource generation, optimisation and submissions of data feeds for their ecommerce site to specialist players like Enclick Online Solutions.

[Disclosure: EUCAP Partners is invested in Enclick Ltd – data feed provider and its shopping portal]