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.

One of the favorite keynotes of any Drupalcon of course is the State of Drupal address. Here’s video of Dries from Szeged:

(I took the one supplied by archive.org and cut out the first 37 minutes, including Drupalcon logistics – 10% female attendance!- and a welcome from the vice-mayor of Szeged, Sandor Nagy, who revealed that Szeged is open source friendly but unfortunately uses Joomla! to manage their web pages).

I love Dries’ approach. Most of the talk is structured around this list of the five things preventing Drupal from achieving world domination:

1. Slow porting of contributed modules
2. Learning curve
3. Restricted access to Drupal talent
4. Drupal.org Experience
5. Lack of Features

He basically walks through each, commenting on what might be going on and how the Drupal community at large can address the issue.

Highlights:

• Seems clear that more features need to move into core. Some (more) aspects of pathauto, CCK, and Views into core, perhaps a WYSIWYG editor (though Dries said he isn’t quite ready to pick one here). Looking at what modules most people install helps determine where core should go.
• Multimedia handling and file handling generally – cleaning up the relationship between files and nodes.
• Usability improvements – here the focus is on Drupal.org as well as Drupal itself. The default install and administer experience is still too confusing. There’s an initial step for first time users that is still too high.
• RDF/Semantic Web – moving beyond the assumption that output = xhtml (This was also a theme at Drupalcon Boston)

When will Drupal 7 be frozen? When it is ready to be frozen. Not likely before January 2009, maybe not even then.

I think it’s a very useful concept, pointing out that people’s decisions aren’t binary: it isn’t a single yes/no decision but an active, ongoing negotiation, which determines which services you use and don’t use.

You can also think about the barrier to entry of a new user in a similar fashion. Any time you try out a new application or service there are a few barriers, and whatever the application developer can do to lower those barriers the more users will get over that threshold.

(One of the key benefits of open source, from my point of view, is the relatively low threshold of entry it makes possible – no need to negotiate an enterprise license, sign up for 2 years of support, and get lawyers to agree on terms – just download, install, and try out).

In social web applications, the barrier to entry is generaly sign up – authorization and authentication. Applications running inside containers like Facebook have the benefit of bypassing the authentication problem – by relying on Facebook to determine that you are appropriately logged in to your own identity – but still need to get authorization from you to “install” themselves to your profile.

The problem is that Facebook (or Facebook application developers, guided by the Facebook API) seems to treat this experience as a binary choice: you either install the application or you don’t. From the application’s point of view, you are either a user who has installed the app (in which case you’re in) or a user who has not yet installed the app (in which case you’re out).

Why should I have to install an application in order to be able to see the message my firend sent me using it?

Jonathan Terleski, from Google’s User Experience Team, posted a movie today showing a better way: allow users to experience the application and then – after they have determined it has some value to them – ask for the install.

What do you do, though, if you’re outside the environment of an open social container or the Facebook API? Use OpenID and OAuth.

Keeping the barrier to entry low:

1. Let people have a decent sense of the experience before “creating an account” (or whatever language you use to describe registering). Let ‘em try before they buy, as much as possible.
2. Use OpenID. Enable people to log in to your new service using their existing identity elsewhere. With Yahoo! and AOL on board, and the directed identity features of OpenID 2.0 (which let users click a button marked “log in with your Yahoo! account” rather than remembering a URL) we should see end user adoption of OpenID take off. (It may be “unaware adoption” in the sense that people don’t know it is OpenID being used, but that’s actually a good thing).
3. Leverage their data from elsewhere, using import via Google’s Social Graph API, hCard profiles they may have on other sites, XFN or FOAF notations from sites like Twitter which markup links with microformats, and OAuth to access third party data.

I’m looking forward to seeing more detail on the Ringside Social Application Server next week – looks to offer a very compelling path to bringing social networking features into applications without imposing a high barrier to entry. See also DiSo, Noserub, Shindig, and the Appleseed Project (which may need to change its name to avoid the other Appleseed Project).

[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]

[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]

Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.

The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.

The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.

(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)

The full presentation listed 11 key needs for Drupal 7, highlighting usability and APIs, as well as the more predictable “CCK Fields into core and “Views lite in Core” approach.

Dries also set expectations for the code freeze for Drupal 7 – May 15, 2008- but suggested that code freeze could be delayed as far as October 2008 if 100% test coverage existed for core.

The last section was all about the semantic web and RDF triples, arguing that better usage of structured data in RDF formats could enable Drupal powered sites to become part of the broader emerging data web.

“Google and others want to build a social graph which connects everyone – we have an opportunity to build a larger graph which connects everything.”

I will link to the presentaiton itself when posted – for now also check out http://twitter.com/benfinklea who was live tweeting it and keeping up far better than I could.