Today, JanRain announced the latest feature to RPX. Now in addition to getting login functionality, RPX users also gain a social sharing feature that allows visitors to distribute content to various social media sites.
It’s really interesting to watch the continued progression of Portland-based JanRain‘s efforts with RPX, its drop-in, single sign-on solution designed to help sites and developers quickly and easily solve the “login credential” problem. And just to think, it all began with JanRain trying to simplify the OpenID workflow. How cool is that?
Today, JanRain announced the latest feature to RPX. Now in addition to getting login functionality, RPX users also gain a social sharing feature that allows visitors to distribute content to various social media sites. Read More
The message carried some very interesting tidbits about future OpenID developments with Google. Sachs recommended using Portland-based JanRain’s RPX solution for OpenID.
When a company like Google recommends using Portland-based JanRain for OpenID implementations that that just lends credence to my argument, doesn’t it?
thanks to the efforts of Portland-based JanRain, even the good old brick and mortar companies like KMart and Sears are jumping on the OpenID bandwagon.
Google (maybe you’ve heard of them?) has just announced two new enhancements to the Google OpenID API. And it just so happens that Portland-based JanRain and their RPX solution have come to play a critical role in the announcement: they’re one of the first examples of the new features in use. Read More
All of the sudden everybody in Portland is going all Hollywood on us.
First SplashCast announces that they’re partnering with Hulu. And now JanRain has announced that their RPX solution—a product that makes managing the ever-growing variety of distributed login credentials easier for developers and users—is going to be helping InterscopeGeffenA&M, a division Universal Music Group, give fans an easier way to connect with their favorite artists.
Using the RPX interface, fans who’d like to connect with say, Lady Gaga, have the option of using their Facebook identity, Google identity, MySpace identity, or any variety of OpenID flavors, like AOL, Yahoo!, or Portland’s MyOpenID or myVidoop.
Where did all of these options come from all of the sudden? Well…
It’s been quite the month for the world of distributed social networking. Both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect – two services designed to help user manage a single profile across multiple sites – launched on the same day. Then, MySpace followed in close succession with their MySpaceID offering, another distributed social option built on the Open Stack. In a matter of days, the distributed social space went from nascent to completely confusing.
JanRain is hoping to make it a little less confusing, for both developers and users. And if they have to work with big-time music types—like 50 Cent, Fergie, and Guns n’ Roses—to get that done, so be it.
It’s no secret that I fancy Portland the hub of OpenID development. And it’s days like today that I actually sound like I know about that which I am blabbering.
How? By focusing not on those people holding an OpenID, but on those who want to allow people to use that OpenID—but simply can’t figure out how.
With this new software-as-a-service solution (that’s a lot of “s”s, isn’t it?), RPX, JanRain has the makings of a service that allows anyone to drop OpenID support—and OAuth support for that matter—into place on their site. Simply and easily.
With RPX you don’t need to become a security expert, a protocol expert, or play through a number of security and data flow problems, RPX handles all of this for you and delivers a simple payload in either JSON or XML.
With RPX, JanRain has the opportunity to take that same kind of plug-and-play OpenID login concept to the larger Web—beyond blogs—to the companies who could greatly benefit from the technology.
And that’s very cool.
It’s also cool that they could be making some money off of subscription fees to deliver that service.
As an aside, I’m also happy to report that JanRain gains the distinction of being the first Portland company that I got to cover for ReadWriteWeb. And I can’t tell you how great it is to share the amazing tech scene here in Portland on that larger stage.
Well and speaking of that larger stage, JanRain also garnered coverage on a little tech blog of which you may have heard, TechCrunch.
Dare I say “YAY Portland!”? Indeed I do.
Still hungry for more OpenID news? Fear not, gentle reader. A little bird tells me that they’ll be some more cool OpenID stuff being released here in Portland within the next week or so.
