Another blog bites the dust

Continuing my previous post about OpenID and Vendor Lock-In, a reader of this blog named Andrew commented on the previous post about a problem he had with MyOpenID.com and Zooomr. He has some valid points here which I wanted to highlight in this post (he also had some points that I think can be easily fixed or that are actually a non issue). You can also read my complete answer to Andrew here.

Prior to discovering the whole idea and notion of OpenID Andrew registered to Zooomr. Zooomr’s accounts are actually OpenID accounts which they provide, so every Zooomr user also gets an OpenID account that he can use on other OpenID supported sites.

I have Gentoo Linux on my home machine and after I’ve upgraded GCC (and subsequently the whole toolchain) I wanted to compile a perl related library – crypt-rsa.

When I tried to emerge it, it failed with the following error:

Could not run/locate “i386-pc-linux-gnu-gcc”

After searching around I found this thread on the Gentoo forums which had some instructions how to handle this issue, but it didn’t help much.

In one of the posts on that thread they said to re-emerge the offending package (if you find it). I figured, since I’m trying to compile something related to Perl, perhaps Perl is the problem.

There is a lot going on about OpenID these days and a lot of claims are being raised which prevents greater adoption of OpenID by users.

One of these claims is about Trust and Vendor Locking. How can I trust a certain OpenID vendor? after all, gaining access to my OpenID account will give access to all of the sites I’ve signed in/up using OpenID.

This is a legitimate claim, since it reminds everyone of how Microsoft Passport.NET Live ID is not that successful being a one vendor, non transferable identity.

After reading Grant Robertson’s post – “Taming your own river of news” I’ve decided to use Yahoo Pipes to create my online life feed (it sounds better than “Eran’s river of news”, don’t you think?)

You can check it out here.

Basically I aggregate the feeds from this blog, my Advanced .NET debugging blog, my Yedda questions, my Yedda answers, my del.icio.us links and my Flickr photostream.

These feeds are most of the content I’m generating or contributing to (at least the ones with a feed in it). If I’ll remember some other feeds that I’m contributing to and forgot to add, I’ll update the pipe.

I’m probably the last person to talk about this but Scott Kveton posted on his blog that his company, JanRain and GNR (who manages the .name top level domain) has come into partnership to deliver a solution that encompasses a .name URL for you as well as built-in OpenID delegation support.

Check the details at the FreeYourID.com site.

You’ll get a 90 days free trial, after which it will cost $10.95/year.

You’ll get a forwarding email address in the form of yourFirstName@youLastName.name (if its available) as well as a site in the form of www._yourFirstName_._yourLastName_.name. You can forward that site to whatever page you wish.

I think Yahoo Pipes is really cool. The main attraction is its slick user interface and ease of use.

I just created a pipe of all of the Recent Questions of Yedda translated using Babelfish to French and it took less than 5 minutes.

I do have a couple of ideas that I think will make Yahoo Pipes into something very interesting:

• Accept Regular HTML pages
• Have a built-in Microformats parser
• Support for a more complex piping scripting (perhaps in the form of a JavaScript script)
• Support for state saving (or at least a limited way such as the ability to compare the previous version of the page/feed you are piping)

**Accept Regular HTML pages