You know one of the this week's biggest news was

It's All about Me

"Identity" replaces "experience" as the next big concept in design and media thinking. People create their own identities interacting with products and services. The notion of a consumer experience is a more passive way of thinking. It's so 20th century. Identity gets the buzz in '08.

As you guys all probably know, Bloglines is one of the the leading online RSS readers. Many of us here at openmaru also use Bloglines for catching up with blogs and news. Of course, we’ve been loving it even more ever since the upgrade. :)

Anyhow, the news of the day is this: Bloglines now supports OpenID. That’s, in fact, real good news. OpenID is something whose value increases exponentially if it’s supported by major applications. Now, we’ve got one of THE major web applications joining the band, we can maybe even happily expect other services to start jumping in as well.

You don’t have an OpenID account yet? You can so easily create one simply by visiting our OpenID service: myID.net. We provide many great services as an OpenID provider.

But wait! We have one more “major” service coming tomorrow. It’s openmaru’s service called Springnote. Yes, its English version is finally live! More on this fascinating service tomorrow!

What amazed and amused us even more was that MyID has been listed as one of the OpenID providers on the site. Awesome!

When we came across this article, we were like "Yes! Yes! Yes!" because that's exactly what we are trying to do here at openmaru: Give rights back to users!

We've always believed in the open Web, open social networks, open media, and open platforms, so to see an article written by big names like Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington, was definitely a huge encouragement.

Here's the list of rights users must have:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
    the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Also, the sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

That's where myID nicely can come in. Being an OpenID provider, it creates a great way for users to move their identity data around. But, we don't stop there. We also enable our users to move their contact list around. We also have a series of features to be added as time goes on, all in sync with the lists above.

The "four-fathers" of the bill of rights deeply understand the value of the open Web. We are trying to push hard in the same direction as well.

That's what gets us excited. This is the Web IN THE MAKING. And we, as in everyone, are the makers.

Of course, having a sip of what this Web will be a great starting point. Wouldn't it? ;)

As part of our ongoing effort to make myID.net user-friendly and user-accessible, we’ve come up with few brilliant ideas and features that’ll greatly help you in use of myID.net The first one of them is Bookmarklets.

As you know bookmarklets are small browser functions that allow you to bookmark pages or features. With myID bookmarklets, we essentially provide two functions.

First one is for bookmarking all your friends OpenID’s. It’s quite difficult and tedious to write them all down to manage them. With myID bookmarklets, you can simply drag and drop the contact list button into your browser. And then you can press the button to add your friends' OpenID’s into your own contact list every time you see it. It's just like how you bookmark pages on del.icio.us. The second bookmarklet allows your browser to auto-complete your own OpenID when you sign in to services just by clicking on the bookmarklet, saving much of time and effort. 

Both bookmarklets are browser-dependent, but still very easy to deploy. You can find out more details on how to use them on the tools & tips page.

Here's the screencast of how to use bookmarklets. Look how easy bookmarklets are to use!

Yes, we’re not more a mere OpenID provider service. We also go into the ID consumer side as well. It’s pretty simple. We create services that are valuable to every day users and customers. We’re all about people and bringing values to them. Bookmarklets are only snippets of what we want to do. In the next post, we’ll explain one of our most convenient features in contact list import features.

• donating the domain "openid.co.kr" to the public, which is the Korean-translated proxy of openid.net
• started the OpenID community in Korea through openid.or.kr
• lauching of myID.net, currently the largest OpenID provider (IDP) in Korea
• completed the translation of OpenID 1.1 specs into Korean with the OpenID community
• offering of the jointsignup service, designed to foster OpenID consumer activities
• various evangelizing and education activities to major portals like Daum, leading them to join the OpenID initiative
• offering of Veresion 2 with additional services on myID.net, such as contact list and group membership, in order to popularize OpenID services in general