AOL Tests Jabber Gateway

Florian Jensen blogged about an AOL test server that lets you connect to AIM and ICQ accounts using XMPP, an open protocol also used by Google Talk. This tutorial shows how to connect using a client that supports XMPP, but you shouldn't expect too much from an experimental project.

Edwin Aoki from AOL confirmed the news: "We've been working really hard over the past few years in making all of our services more open and standards based, working with the SIP as well as the Jabber/XMPP communities. Our XMPP gateway at xmpp.oscar.aol.com, which we've been working on for a while now, is just one approach we're tinkering with. (...) This particular server at xmpp.oscar.aol.com is a test server, so I wouldn't count on it being reliable or even continuously available until we put some more work into it to bring it up to our standards. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for more announcements from us soon."

Justin Uberti, a former AOL employee who now works for Google, is hopeful about the future. "Right now you can only connect to the AIM/ICQ network using this gateway, there is no XMPP Federation. This means that you cannot talk to users on any other IM network at this time, including Google Talk. Hopefully AOL will add support for XMPP Federation in the near future."

For now, Gmail lets you chat with your contacts from AIM or ICQ, but you still need accounts on those networks.

Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.


Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.

Yahoo Will Add Support for OpenID

In one of the greatest moves since the Zimbra acquisition, Yahoo announced today that it will provide support for OpenID 2.0 at the end of this month. "Yahoo! (...) announced its support for the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework for all 248 million active registered Yahoo! users worldwide. OpenID, an open framework based on proven Internet technologies, enables users to consolidate their Internet identity, eliminating the need to create separate IDs and logins at all of the various websites, blogs, and profile pages they may visit in the course of their online session. In addition to the many leading Yahoo! services users already enjoy, anyone with a Yahoo! ID will be able to use the same ID for easy access to any sites that support OpenID 2.0. Yahoo!'s initial OpenID service, which will be available in public beta on January 30, enables a seamless and transparent web experience by allowing users to use their custom OpenID identifier on me.yahoo.com or to simply type in www.yahoo.com or www.flickr.com on any site that supports OpenID 2.0."

From January 30, any Yahoo ID will also become an OpenID that could be used to authenticate on any site that accepts OpenIDs (for example, to post comments on Blogger). Even if many important companies backed this authentication system, very few started to support it and this reduced its usefulness. Yahoo mentions that it will triple the number of OpenIDs to 368 million, although I don't think there's a way to calculate the total number of OpenIDs.

Hopefully this is just a start and many other companies, including Google, will become OpenID providers and will accept OpenIDs.

Related:
Blogger implements OpenID
Use your own domain as an OpenID

iGoogle Theme Directory

iGoogle will soon let you create your own theme and upload it to a directory. The documentation for building themes is very detailed and you can already select some themes created by famous designers: Troy Lee's Supermoto Mayhem, Yves Behar's Earth-light, John Maeda's Simplicity is Complex, Mark Frauenfelder's Adventure in Lollipopland and a new theme created by Google: Countryside.

"The Themes API lets you create custom designs for iGoogle. Themes are visual designs that personalize iGoogle pages for millions of users. Themes are not just static designs--they can change throughout the day to reveal a visual storyline, message, or anything else."

Google Code Blog encourages everyone to personalize iGoogle. "Creating your own theme isn't rocket science. If you can create a webpage, then you can create a theme. There are only three steps involved: designing images for the header and footer, entering metadata and color information in an XML file, and submitting the theme."




Update. More themes (not yet included in the directory): Projected Box (3-D rendering of colorful projected boxes), Books, The Sims 2, Spore, Eat Every Sandwich, Harvest Party, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

Google to Launch Picasa for Mac

TechCrunch found from a Google employee that we should expect to see a version of Picasa for Mac later this year. "I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year."

For now, Picasa only works in Windows and Linux, using WINE. There's also a Mac uploader for Picasa Web Albums that lets you upload photos from iPhoto.

Google is increasingly concerned with supporting other operating systems than Windows: a single Google software works only in Windows - Google Talk, even though there's a limited web version.

Software	Windows	Mac	Linux
Google Toolbar	yes	yes - Apr. 2006	yes - Apr. 2006
Google Desktop	yes	yes - Apr. 2007	yes - June 2007
Google Earth	yes	yes - Jan. 2006	yes - June 2006
SketchUp	yes	yes - June 2006	no
Picasa	yes	no	yes - May 2006
Google Talk	yes	no	no

Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts

A useful feature of Gmail Manager, a great Firefox extension that notifies you when you receive new Gmail messages, is that you can easily log in to a different Gmail account without entering the username and password: after adding your Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts, select the account by right-clicking on the Gmail Manager icon in the status bar and then click on the icon.


Another way to easily switch between your Gmail accounts is the Google Account Multi-Login Greasemonkey script, but it stores the passwords in a non-secure way.

Hopefully, Google will add a feature that lets you link a main Google account with your other accounts and log in once to access all your Google accounts, like you can do in Windows Live Hotmail:


If you want to minimize the number of times you access your secondary Gmail accounts, forward all the messages to your main account and enable it to send messages using custom From: addresses.

Google Prepares for a Better Mobile Web

One reason why Google and other companies develop interfaces optimized for iPhone is that people actually use Apple's phone to browse the web. New York Times (free login) reports that "on Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device (...). A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone."

Google has another reason for providing special interfaces for iPhone: they'll work on Android phones too, since Android's default browser uses the same rendering engine as Apple's Safari, namely WebKit.

Today, in the first day of MacWorld, Google will announce an update for its unified mobile interface, codenamed Grand Prix. Among the new features, the navigation bar will be customizable, Gmail will automatically show new messages without having to refresh the page, the compose page will include contacts, while Google Calendar will add a month-at-a-glance view. The updated iGoogle will probably be integrated in the interface.

"Google, which developed the first version of Grand Prix in six weeks, is introducing a new version on Monday, just six weeks after the first one. That is a speed of development not previously possible on mobile phones," said Vic Gundotra, vice-president at Google.

Vic Gundotra expects that "consumers are going to demand Internet browsers [as good as Apple's]" and the mobile web experience will improve.

Update.
From a Google announcement (my emphasis): "These new features provide iPhone users with a desktop-like Google web application experience in terms of ease-of-use, speed, and feature richness but optimized for the iPhone. This experience is made possible by the iPhone's general usability and the capabilities of its web browser, combined with Google's innovative mobile web applications. We plan to expand this experience to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. One of our goals is to support platforms that are fulfilling the promise of the mobile web - like the iPhone - and to ultimately deliver unique and compelling mobile experiences that improve people's daily lives."

Update 2: Google Mobile Blog has some screenshots of the updated interface.