OpenID Gets Closer to Real Usability

Until recently I hadn’t been impressed with the so-called “seamlessness” of how OpenID was going to make life easier for actual users trying to register on Web sites. But things may be starting to come together. RPX, for example, has commercialized a very easy OpenID login/registration interface. If you want to see it in action on a live site, go to UserVoice and register. It’s now not so hard to imagine a world where we have one identity and one password, linking not just all our social networks but all the content and commerce sites we have relationships with.

Now let’s use the same open-standard approach to make it easier for one e-commerce relationship to grant us easier access to premium content across sites, without having to make multiple individual subscription purchases.

(And by the way, if you are a connoisseur of elegant registration/purchase screens – you know who you are – UserVoice’s are beautifully designed, well engineered, and short.)

Nice Change from Those Endless Red-Blue Maps

Here’s an imaginative Election Day feature from the New York Times: A real-time tag cloud reflecting how voters say they’re feeling during the course of the day.

Fast Company’s “Sweeping Initiative” Gets Swept

The recent layoffs at Mansueto Digital aren’t a surprise if you have tried what PaidContent.org calls their “sweeping social media initiative.” I am afraid I panned their nascent social network at FastCompany.com in my very first post back in July. Three months after registering, I still haven’t received a single e-mail from this network inviting me to come back. I guess the likelihood I’ll get one is even lower now. From the outside, at least, this looks like a future case study on how not to start a social network.

Another Seemingly Empty Social Network – Times People

Just signed up for Times People, which intrusively appeared above my nytimes.com home page this morning. Easy enough to sign up (name and city are all that’s required), but once you do, what’s the benefit?

Like so many other wannabe networks, after you sign up there’s no sense of who else is around, who might be talking about something interesting, or what’s available to you that wasn’t before.

I know it’s hard to make a network look interesting when no one has signed up for it yet – but it’s the equivalent of having people click on a section of the online newspaper and get a page with a “no stories about this” message.

New wsj.com, old bigmoney.com

Once I got over the four horizontal navbars at the top of the page, I thought today’s new wsj.com was a long-overdue improvement. The home page looks great. And despite predictions that there’d be lots more free content, so far five of the top six stories in “What’s News” still require a paid subscription ($89).

They’ve also launched their new Journal Community, although at first glance it suffers from the same social networking “empty bar” problem I’ve ranted about before. Too bad News Corp. wasn’t able to buy LinkedIn, as was rumored a while ago before its billion-dollar valuation. That would have made more sense than starting over here from scratch.

Surprising to see no ad units above the fold on the home page, unless there are some spots that just don’t happen to be sold.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s new Big Money has little to read, and can’t even keep its home-page widgets from colliding into one another (below).

NYTimes.com-LinkedIn Deal Is Less Than Meets the Eye

It was a great press release when LinkedIn announced its deal with NYTimes.com to display “customized” news on the Times site based on users’ LinkedIn profile data. You’ll see the unit on story pages inside the “Business” and “Technology” sections of the Times site (although not on the home pages for those sections.)

Great Position for LinkedIn on NYTimes.com

Trouble is, the box doesn’t really deliver anything very customized. All LinkedIn is doing is telling the Times I’m a “Media Professional” (for which I’m grateful, of course) so the stories in the box are the same ones on the “Media” page of the Times, which I already read anyway. And, of course, the stories are only from the Times. So the box, for readers, is duplicative and uninteresting.

Seems like a fabulous visibility deal for LinkedIn, maybe not such a great deal for the Times. Or am I missing something?

Building a Social Network Gets Easier (Sort Of)

Interesting piece from ReadWriteWeb about the growing social-networking capabilities of low-end content management platforms like WordPress. The barriers to entry are getting lower and lower, and the idea that there’s advertising and other revenue to be generated from vertical networks will keep media companies on the hunt.

What’s still unclear, however, is how many social networks the average person is willing to go through the hassle of registering for and staying up to date with. Some vertical networks (The Biz from Variety, for example) try to make it easy to import the data you’ve already worked to hard to create on LinkedIn. But the real answer won’t come until there are some easier open standards to share your personal/membership data across multiple networks.

Until then, every publisher who thinks starting a social network is a great idea will have to have a plan to overcome some significant barriers to registration and participation.

The Empty Bar Effect

Have you ever walked into a bar and immediately turned around and left, just because the place seemed so empty? That’s the way I feel when I sign up for the social networks that so many companies are trying to start up from scratch.

I’m a longtime fan and reader of Fast Company, but their new social network is, unfortunately, just such an empty bar. You can invest quite a bit of time filling out an extensive online profile (OK, I’m only 50% done), and you can even upload all your contacts into their community. But you’ll still see nothing but this:

Unlike LinkedIn, Fast Company doesn’t tell you which of your uploaded contacts might already be members of the community, or give you any other way to see someone you might want to talk to based on all the data you just gave them. (Their promo for the network claims that it will proactively find you some people related to your interests, but I can’t find this actually happening.) There isn’t even an easy way to browse existing members by geographical area, or by the industry you work in. You can’t even find out how many people are in this network, or whether anyone’s running the place.

Every publisher thinks social networks are the key to their online futures. But for users, signing up for a social network is a lot of work. They have a right to expect that the network will at least look like it’s working hard in return. Unless you immediately feel as if you’ve walked into a community where things are actually going on and there are people you might like to meet, you’re going to turn right around and head to a bar where there are some people who seem like they’re having a good time.