It's official - SourceForge.net has joined the OpenID bandwagon. SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, is a little late to the party but nonetheless, it's nice to see a leader of the open source community adopting OpenID and walking the walk.

OpenID is an open source, decentralized, digital identity user system which allows users to have one identity across the internet and alleviates the hassle of having multiple user names and passwords to log-in to different sites.

OpenID is gaining traction with big companies such as AOL, Sun, Microsoft, and Novell who are accepting and providing OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

Thanks FF!

Computerworld is reporting (and ReadWriteWeb is confirming) that Microsoft will be joining the Data Portability Working Group. Microsoft adds to the growing list of companies that have signed on with DataPortability.org. Since the beginning of the year, Google, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr (Yahoo!) and SixApart have joined the project. The project, which in its own words, aims to allow users to "connect, control, share and remix" their data across multiple online services and protocols. As the Computerworld article points out, getting Microsoft to join in is a real boon to the project because of its vast user base. More than 400 million users have an account with Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail or both.

The concept of data portability has become a pretty hot topic in the last few weeks, thanks to the brouhaha over Robert Scoble's screen-scraping scheme that led him to get banned from Facebook for less than a day and with the announcement that high profile players, Google and Facebook, would be joining the endeavor.

As a video we posted last week explains, attempting to keep accounts and contacts synchronized across multiple sites and platforms is one of the more tedious side effects of the whole Web 2.0 revolution. DataPortability.org wants to change that.

And although it is still very early, moves like last week's announcement that Yahoo! will begin supporting the OpenID 2.0 framework leave us hopeful and inspired.

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

This edition covers:

• Google reworks Adsense, again... and again
• Blogger users can use Blogger url as OpenID
• Google still bidding for the 700 Mhz spectrum in FCC auction

Google reworks Adsense, again... and again
Much commotion ensued after Google Adsense decided that publishers who send referrals from outside of North America, Latin America, or Japan would be retired. This in addition to announcing that several referral bonuses were to be discontinued made for quite a bit of a storm in the blogosphere. Google, hearing the outcry of the community, quickly made some amendments: as long as the referral is located within North America, Latin America, or Japan, it does not matter where the publisher is located. But still, no more bonuses.

This means users will be able to log into more than 9,000 OpenID enabled sites with their Yahoo! username and password. For those of you who are unfamiliar with OpenID, it is a single sign on system for the web. Meaning if you look to join and log-in to a new site, you can use one username and password across all these disperate websites. For more info about OpenID, see Wikipedia or the OpenID homepage.

This can be counted as a huge win for the OpenID project. We believe in the idea of OpenID, but it won't be successful until the major players in the web market hop on board. We hope to see the other big companies such as Google and MSN hop on board and start serving up some OpenID goodness.

[via TechCrunch]

It's a weekday, so we probably shouldn't be surprised to see a couple of updates from the Google camp. There are two new features in Google Reader. One could make your life a bit easier, while the other could do the same -- or it could become a huge time sink.

The first new feature is drag and drop feed organization. In other words, you don't need to use drop down menus to place feeds in a new folder, just click and drag it into the folder where it belongs.

The second feature is personalized feed recommendations. Google takes a look at your subscribed feeds and web search history and tries to find feeds that match your tastes. While this is great if you're always looking for new blogs to add to your feed list, if you're someone who already spends way too much of your day sifting through feeds in Google Reader, this feature could keep you from ever turning your computer off. Ever. Not that we speak from experience.

Google has also rolled out one significant update to Blogger today: you can now leave comments on blogs using OpenID. Up until now you needed a Blogger or Google account if you didn't want to leave an anonymous post.

Bloglines is announcing several updates to its web-based RSS reader today. The service now supports OpenID, meaning you can login to Bloglines using the same secure information you use to login to other sites. The company says this is just the first step in supporting a more open platform for Bloglines.

There's also a new mobile version of Bloglines Beta with new features including improved browser support, a start page listed at the top of the screen, and the ability to "pin" items that you want to come back to later.

There are also some new personalization features under the settings tab in the full version of Bloglines. For example, you can set viewing preferences for individual feeds. If you always like to read some feeds in full view and others in list view, there's no more need to flip back and forth, back and forth.

Earlier this month, 37signals added a One Bar feature to allow users of their Basecamp project management and Highrise correspondence tracking services to sign into both sites at once. Fortunately, after issuing a major update to Backpack, their wildly popular web-based PIM app, they have added Backpack to the One Bar signin. This will save some time and simplify switching between these services, and the only requirement of One Bar is an OpenID, an increasingly adopted service that allows you to tie website logins to one single ID and password for the ultimate in web security and convenience.

Now that so many sites seem to be adopting OpenID, you might have decided that you want one. You may also have decided that you don't want it tied to your circa 1997 AOL screen name (I'm looking at you cyrano99). What better than to tie your online ID to your real identity and keep things nice and simple?

Enter FreeYourID.

The FreeYourID service combines a personal domain in the .name TLD with an OpenID provided by MyOpenID. since your OpenId will be tied to your .name url, it is theoretically good for life--or as long as you keep the DNS registry up to date--rather than your tenure with with AOL, LiveJournal, another service. And since it's based on your name you should have less compunction about using it in a professional context than, say hottl33gs.

In addition to the OpenID, FreeYourID also includes forwarding of both your .name email and url to addresses of your choice.

They're currently running a 90-day free promo, and membership is $10.95 per year after that. If you don't like it, you can transfer your .name domain to another registrar if you want to keep it.

So far, I've stayed away from OpenID, mostly because I haven't wanted to tie my identity to any particular url. The ability to easily combine the ID with a .name domain, though, may be what finally pushes me over the edge. It would certainly make life a lot simpler.

There is one "gotcha," though: I wouldn't use the service for any particularly secure application yet. Passwords can only contain upper and lower case letter and numbers. Attempts to enter punctuation or other characters result in an "invalid character" warning. That seems pretty short-sighted to me.

[via Phil Windley]

Recently, AOL and Microsoft signed on in support of Open ID. Now social news juggernaut Digg has announced plans to join the party, declaring it will adopt the decentralized digital identity platform later this year. Digg founder Kevin Rose made the announcement earlier this week at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

OpenID is a system that allows you to have one username and password for every site you visit. That username and password is actually a secure personal URL that stores your personal information and allows you to control what information you share with websites. Other services that have announced their adoption of OpenID include Yahoo, Wikipedia, and LiveJournal.

[via TechCrunch]

AOL's John Panzer announced on Wednesday, "Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI", giving a giant push towards widespread adoption of the decentralized Internet ID system. Just a few days ago, Bill Gates announced Microsoft will also support version 2.0 of the OpenID as well, a sign that Microsoft may be ready to admit its own Passport ID is a failure.

It's exceptional news that has gone mostly unnoticed on the public screen. We're not talking about pie in the sky, "we might adopt it one day" rhetoric. AOL has turned up full and working support for OpenID with a grand total of over 63 million users. There's a lot of good to AOL's full implementation, and as some remind us, a bit of potential for bad. What if you don't want an OpenID, or don't want to use AOL as your OpenID provider? AOL's Panzer responds, "My take is, if you don't actually use the OpenID URL, it doesn't really exist. The same way a Wiki page doesn't exist until you edit it. On the other hand, having people go in and kick the tires to uncover issues is exactly why we're talking about this."

The reality is, both sides have a point. If OpenID is to succeed we'll have quite a few bumps and arguments along the way. What's important at this stage is progress. For OpenID to be a success on any level, widespread adoption by the big players is incredibly important. A slew of 63 million users is substantial added traction towards the groundswell that OpenID will need in a not-too-far off future.

See also : Microsoft will support OpenID

Bill Gates made a surprise announcement Tuesday during his keynote at the RSA security conference: Microsoft will support OpenID 2.0. Great, but what's OpenID?

You know how every time you sign up for a new web service, you have to create a username and password? And you know how you're always worried that you'll forget your login information, so you wind up using pretty much the same password for most sites? And then you get all worried that someone at one site could find a way into your bank records, so you start creating variation until you can't remember which password goes with which site.

If you're someone who regularly has to click the "forgot password" link on web sites, OpenID is made for you. It's a system that allows you to login to mulitiple web sites with a single username and password, which is actually a personalized URL that securely stores your user information. OpenID is the free and open source invention of Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal.

OpenID would also seem to be competition for Microsoft's Passport system, which works primarily with Microsoft sites. Microsoft is the largest company so far to announce support for OpenID, which currently works with sites including LiveJournal, Zooomr, and Vox.

[via Thomas Hawk]

Jyte doesn't do much beside providing a little fun during your downtime. It lets users claim something they have to say about friends, family, movies, music, virtually anything, then have other users vote on it. If you want to make a comment on how the commercials at this year's Super Bowl were nothing to write home about, and see how many people agree or disagree with your comment, Jyte lets you do it. It's basically another way to add a little social networking into your arguments. The service launched last week and has over 1,100 claims in such topics as food, web, politics, coffee and music. Jyte was created by JanRain, who make identity services for the web using OpenID protocols, which make use of in Jyte.