Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.

This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:

Our sprint changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used. In the case of OpenID, we intercept the login procedure and, taking advantage of the fact that you’re already logged into your browser, and then use Weave identity to let you into the site.

Screencast

Unfortunately, for now, you have to install the latest weave development build which also requires you to be running Firefox 3.5 beta, so it isn’t really quite ready for public consumption.

There’s also, of course, the risk that people will use this poorly – storing saved OpenID on shared machines, etc – but I think the model of allowing the browser – after you’ve logged into it – to login on your behalf – will be a really good UX improvement over time, and one I hope the other browsers will take up and implement themselves.

Two quick announcements this week which bode well for OpenID:

1. PayPal joins the OpenID Foundation
2. Facebook joins the OpenID Foundation

It’s fantastic to see the largest and fastest growing social network (in the US anyway) and a major online payment provider both joining the momentum behind the open stack and the assembled web.

See also:

• PayPal Joins OpenID Foundation
• 5 Reasons Why Facebook + OpenID is Good News
• Facebook joins OpenID Foundation: So What?
• Facebook | OpenID group

You get some spiffy features, including the ability of other bloggers to leave comments (which appear to be) on your site using OpenID, with threading, and with avatars; but in the process you put all your comments (and your relationship with your blog readers) in someone else’s hands.

It also seems like the real benefits of using TypePad Connect come from network effects – once everyone has a TypePad Profile and every blog uses it for comments, the benefits will be great. But what about when only some of your users have TypePad profiles, or want TypePad profiles? What about letting people comment with identities they already have rather than creating yet another profile / lifestream?

Ok, so maybe the title’s a bit strongly worded, and if you’re already using a hosted blog, or using TypePad for blogging, maybe it doesn’t where your comments actually live. But I don’t think it will work for me.

What is TypePad Connect? It’s basically a drop in replacement for however your blog current handles comments – you swap out how you currently handle comments and use TypePad Connect instead.

Why would you do so?

TypePad Connect Benefits for Bloggers:

• Enables you to accept comments from users with OpenIDs or TypePad Connect Accounts, whether your blogging platform accepts OpenID or not
• Provides threaded comments, with avatars (for users who have TypePad Connect accounts)
• Links comments to profiles of the people leaving them (for users who have TypePad Connect accounts)
• Enables you to moderate and reply to comments via email
• Enables you to manage comments from multiple blogs in one place

What about blog readers? (Forgetting for the moment that many blog readers are also blog authors)

Benefits for users:

• OpenID. If you don’t have an OpenID, you can sign up for a TypePad Connect account and oyu will get one, though then you will likely use your TypePad Connect account to leave blog comments rather than your OpenID.
• A TypePad Connect profile – lifestream, avatar, etc.
• A comment feed – where you can track comments on posts you’ve also commented on, replies o your comments, etc. Provided, of course, the blogs you commented on use TypePad Connect (? I think).

So what do I see as the issues? Primarily they all follow from the idea that using TypePad Connect means replacing your blogging platforms built-in comment handling.

This means that:

• Comment-related plugins, search (of comments), moderation, anti-spam, and other features of your own blogging platform are disabled.
• Change your mind down the road, and decide you’d like to move to another platform? Can you get your comments back, or bring them with you? What if you move to a platform TypePad Connect doesn’t support?

Am I being too hard on SixApart? After all, they’re providing OpenIDs for all TypePad Connect profiles, enabling people to comment via OpenID. The profiles are also marked up with “rel=me” microformats, enabling the social graph style APIs to read them semantically.

Ultimately my concern isn’t with the TypePad Connect profile itself – if you don’t already have an existing lifestream and OpenID provider (Chi.mp, for example, or self-hosted like johneckman.com) it seems like a nice way to get one – but with the notion of replacing your blog’s comment moderation and management engine with an outsourced offering.

It seems too much like a shift towards a kind of walled-garden (to be fair, though, the content is open and available to all) of blog comments, in which users without TypePad Connect Profiles get a secondary experience.

It feels like a step backwards to ask users to create an account (albeit one which can be used on other sites too) just to be able to comment – but then nothing prevents users who have an existing OpenID, and a profile at that OpenID url, from using their existing “bring your own” style profile.

What do you think? Is TypePad Connect yet another step toward the open social web, or a step backwards in terms of openness?

For more on TypePad Connect, see the ReadWrite Web review, or the TypePad Connect page at SixApart.

The way the feature should work is that the Alfresco Share application takes the PDF a user uploads into the document library, converts it to an SWF using swftools (one frame of the SWF per each page of the PDF), and then uses the YUI framework to “play” the resulting SWF.

The problem is that for me, depending on the version of Flash installed, the preview SWF cannot be displayed. (Short version: Flash 9.0.45-47 works fine, later Flash versions just result in a spinning cursor which never resolves. The problem is Flash 9.0.45 breaks file upload, which works in later Flash versions).

Good Flash

Bad Flash

Just finding this out required a lengthy exercise including full uninstalls of Flash (using Flash uninstaller for Mac OS X, which takes forever since it is a PowerPC binary running on an Intel machine) along with installs of various versions of Flash from the 9.x archive.

It was in this context that I was so happy to see the dialogue Dion Almaer and Brad Neuberg posted at Ajaxian today: How Flash Can Join The Open Web.

The conversation began on Dion’s techno.blog(“Dion”) with The Flash Platform: How Adobe could join the Open Web to take on . . . in which he argues:

With Silverlight making a huge charge I worry about a world where you have “Best viewed in Silverlight and IE” (which in fact is “only viewed in…”) and people often ask: “But isn’t Flash just as bad?”

Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight :)

Indeed, Dion’s image, which he used to show the developer perception of Flash and Silverlight together in contrast to the Open Web isn’t that much different than this image I’ve used in previous blog posts here:

Brad responded over at coding in paradise with How Flash Can Integrate With The Open Web, in which he argues that:

Adobe (and Macromedia before it) has always been good about evolving Flash forward, including making ActionScript more like JavaScript, embracing markup language development, open sourcing Flex, and more. I’d like to see Flash continue to evolve into being a core part of the Open Web. This would be good for Flash and good for the Open Web.

As Dion points out open sourcing Flash is one big part of making this happen, but another huge aspect would be to have Flash and Flex integrate better into the web stack and be less of a ‘black box’ on the screen.

He goes on to list a number of ways that “Flash should start working like the web itself”:

• Directly push Flex and ActionScript to the browser and Embrace View Source
• Integrate with Bookmarking and History
• Don’t Be Afraid of the Browser
• Hyperlinks Are Your Friend
• Embrace REST and Readable Remoting Protocols
• Embrace SVG
• Integrate With HTML and CSS
• Make Friends With HTML 5 Video
• Support Both Documents and Applications
• Start Working with the W3C and IETF (and/or the Open Web Foundation)

Now, of course it’s not fair to blame Adobe for my troubleshooting woes of the last week – more likely something about the SWFs produced by SWFTools or the way Alfresco Share is trying to pass them through the YUI Components is to blame, and it’s just that some versions of the Flash player are more forgiving than others.

But how much easier would it be to debug such an application if the Flash plugin didn’t create such a “black box” in the middle of my web application? What if I could dive into the running Flash application the way I can dive into the document object model in firebug, and determine the states of objects and content of variables?

Like Brad and Dion, I like what Flash is capable of, but so much more great innovation could be built with Flash if it were more integrated with the rest of the evolving web stack – whether that means open sourcing all of Flash or just finding ways t work with browser makers (commercial and open source) to make the content and interactivity in SWFs more accessible to the end user.

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.

First, is this foundation itself an example of the “yet-another-foundation” syndrome? Why is it that none of the existing organizations would suffice? This is not the Open Social Foundation, not part of OSI, not part of the FSF, not closely related enough to any of the existing non-profits? Why do open source efforts so often end up making their own new group? (Developers always feel they need to invent yet another protocol or start yet another project, rather than adapting an existing one).

Second, is this foundation too focused on a broad, commercially friendly vision of the open web, and not enough focused on user freedom? Is this about continuing to run services based on open source software but services in which the data is captive? Is the focus on non-proprietary specifications too narrow to ensure real freedom, if the implementations of those specs achieve lock-in through data rather than code?

I know it is early days – there’s much discussion which will need to happen to see what OWF can really contribute.

What makes me optimistic is the individuals behind Open Web Foundation – all of which I respect for their contributions to open source and free software. What makes me concerned is that throughout David’s talk this morning he kept focusing on “the big companies that make up the web.” I’d rather see the DiSo approach to social networking, or the Laconi.ca approach to microblogging, be the types of applications the Open Web Foundation helps bring into existence.

In short (as I said on this thread at Get Satisfaction), I’d hate to see us all replicate the FSF/OSI history, with Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on one side and OWF on the other.

(This is a pretty drafty post for me with lots of initial thoughts – please do let me know what you think about this!)