But what happens if Google will buy them?

It will create a direct competitor to all journalists and existing media channels, like Fox News, CNN or BBC.
Twitter users as “Citizen journalists” will post their stories and have adwords. They will publish their pictures on Twitpic and get paid for it.

Good news or bad news? It depends. Twitter isn’t an open platform, it is again an user silo. Good for Twitter, good for Google, sometimes too much in transparent for it’s users.

Google tried to realize the same deal with Jaiku 2 years ago.
Jaiku was a niche community before Google. After the deal more and more spammer joined Jaiku.
Last year Jaiku failed and Google gave up the project
(it will be opensource, but for me the project failed).

The biggest fact: a Google/Twitter deal will initiate a worldwide inflation of new Twitter users. Those news will spread the Twitter community worldwide,
because Google knows everybody and a lot of people will look on Twitter, if Google will announce the deal.

But what happens to Twitter, if the big news will spread and more and more users and more and more spammers will join Twitter?
Maybe it will be harder to track real information or to filter the right value for me.

So it’s time to jump on an open Twitter alternatives, let’s be more active on Identi.ca …

Another presentation from Barcamp Bangkok show some interesting Asian of African web projects:

Why, there are so many applications out there without following the W3C recommendations:

• Keep content consistent and structurally simples
• Provide easy means of navigation
• Avoid free text input whenever possible
• Use small individual markup documents
• Avoid embedded objects of scripts

Sounds easy? The same simple rules can be adopt to all web applications around. When visiting eBay, have you ever been asked to “look carefully, because the order of any menu options have been changed” or when returning to Amazon (the early one, today a lot of pages at Amazon are overloaded), did you ever need to navigate through five levels of menus just to see whether your order has shipped?

The Product Guy wrote some words about a quick assessment of user experiences:

The Quick-UX evaluates the degree to which a product successfully addresses the following 3 questions:

* Can I use it? (Usability)
* Should I use it? (Usefulness)
* Do I want to use it? (Desirability)

Keep all applications small and simple!

Google followed with its own announcement, that Google accounts would serve as OpenID accounts.

We know, Yahoo has supported OpenID for a while now, anyone using Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail now has a valid OpenId.
Additionally MySpace and AOL also support OpenID.

Most current users may not be aware of the fact they have an OpenID identifier.
It would be quite interesting
* what are the biggest OpenID providers derived by the frequency of OpenID usage?
* what is the usage ratio between “big” providers and the many users from small OpenID providers?
* Are public small openID providers interesting for mass user? Should any small company or community run an identity server?

Yahoo release the result of a usability study, they did for OpenID.

Jan Rain hast posted results to 6 general UX approaches for OpenID from the Open User Experience (UX) Summit.

In parallel to the UX discussion the most important topic to OpenID is security and privacy for me.
They are currently discussed in the community, but for me not fully answered:

* what about identity revocation, if anybody else get my key?
* what about phishing prevention?
* what about trusted OpenID provider? who can we trust?
* what about privacy of my user data (customer profile, mixed private and business usage)?
* what if my OpenID provider sell my profile, usage or my network data to anybody else?
* what, if there is a legal case to one of my accounts, how to prevent all account access due to any legal case?
* what, if my OpenID provider no longer exists?

OpenID is a great way to reduce our daily account/password overflow and to get easy access to small sites or to test new services.
But is there a more secure way to share email access, private or business data?

I read on Twitter, that Gustav is now a category 5 storm before i saw it in TV.
Maybe in some months we Twitter feeds as headlines at CNN or N-TV.

Chris Saad suggested on his blog: “using email as OpenID” (published 22 Aug 2008).
That’s a really good idea.

All non-tech people must be confused to enter a URL as identifier on login screens and everybody knows his email-address quite well and use it very frequently.

Another idea: why not use a mobile number (MSISDN) as OpenID identifier for logins?

everybody has one or more mobile numbers and it can also be used with a handshake-SMS to handle user verification.

Easy to use, best user experience, well known and MSISDNs are unique.

I know, that there were some experiments on mobile OpenId earlier this year, yet:
The OpenID mobile experience (published on factoryjoe in January 2008).

OpenId has with email identifier a huge potential for identification.

Image is attributed to wordle.net

it is amazing how fast to get current web news from twitter.
a simple search on tweetscan
shows the Robert Svihla aka eurotransient first reported amazon.com down at 13:24 PST (17:24 GMT).

Digg reported the downtime about 17:25 GMT (10 minutes later).

At Amazon.com or any blogs found not background information.
Now more than 30 minutes later amazon.com is still unavailable.
Would be great if amazon guys would give us an update on twitter.

Amazon is down now more than a hour, any startup loses customer satisfaction at downtimes, but amazon loses big revenue.

Update:

• Michael Arrington at Techcrunch
• CNET: Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday (6 Jun 2008)
• Reuters: Amazon Website Hit By Technical Failure, Shares Fall (6 Jun 2008)
• PC World: Amazon’s U.S. Site Is Down (6 Jun 2008)

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that’s good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you’re a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time, like 37signals, ning, viddler etc.

Every good company should have one!

See a list of company blogs at ReadWriteWeb.

Some thoughts about affiliate spam and Murphy’s law:

How can you help?

• Consider building curation into your service
• Police your service
• Reduce anonymity without reducing
• Punish bad people

Example in Social Networks:

• Myspace: many fake people
• Facebook: less fake people
• LinkedIn: no fake people

Maintain the core principles we founded the internet on:

• free access
• free information
• and a level playing field …
  
  … while taking responsibility for the pollution of the systems we create…

Watch more:

• http://vpod.tv/leweb3/393716
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/leweb3_conference_2007.php
• http://www.leweb3.com/

Posted by The Thomas Koeppen Blog, 2007.