Iphone countdown widget - by springwidgets.com

Get this widget!

My thoughts on the anxiously awaited Iphone. In the meantime, while waiting for this expensive device, I went out and bought a blackberry 8800. I noticed that the blackberry UI, with the way it handles incoming calls, layout of icons and silo'ed navigation model, that it is very similar to the iphone minus the touch screen. Of course, im not comparing the two just yet, but I will say that I think apple did have a bit of a head start by looking at how the blackberry UI handles the ease of use issues. The jury is still out, until this thing launches, but if you put a touch screen on my blackberry and some cool finger sliding controls and I would probably be just as happy. thoughts?

Widgets , Widgets and more wwwwwidgets

If you like widgets, this is the place. SpringWidgets.com is currently still in beta, but you can find many many different flash based widgets for your site and to share with others. The UI is amazingly simple and the setup process will have you grabbing code in minutes. I created a quick logo, uploaded and brought in my RSS feed in 3 steps. Users can grab the code from your public based widget and put on their site also. Have fun widgeting!

How to use your own URL as an OpenID without running your own OpenID server.

It is easy to delegate your own URL to an OpenID server for authentication. For example, you may have an account on an OpenID server, http://yourname.myopenid.com/, but want to use http://yourname.com/ instead.

Simply embed the following into the HTML HEAD of the page you want to use:

< rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server">

< rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yoururl.myopenid.com/">
< equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://yoururl.myopenid.com/xrds">


The role of the OpenID server is to provide a page for you and make claims about user ownership of that page. By pointing a personal page to the page you own on your OpenID server, the consumer can discover your server information, ask you to prove that own the URL on the server, which then also proves that you own the personal URL.

How to use OpenID by Simon Willison

Simon Willison is a Computer Science student from England, currently on placement in Lawrence, Kansas. By day, he develops web applications for the Lawrence Journal-World. By night, he writes about web standards and technologies on his web development weblog.

Feed icons now standardized

Mozilla Foundation recently posted useage guidelines with accompanying FAQ for the feed icon. They've also branded two versions of the icon as being the canonical icons - one that you see here and a smaller 14x14 version that more closely resembles the original Firefox Live Bookmarks icon. Both icons are now part of the download pacakge offered here.

Yahoo! Search marketing

Yahoo today announced the Yahoo Search Marketing Commercial API Program that will provide businesses and developers free and open access to the Panama search marketing application program interfaces (APIs).

The program will give advertisers, developers, ad agencies and technology providers the ability to build upon Yahoo’s core search marketing technologies to enhance their existing business offerings or create brand new search marketing tools and applications.

Susan Decker, head of Yahoo!’s Advertiser & Publisher Group said that opening up Panama was all about gaining market share: “By providing open access to our technology, we are making a clear investment in our advertising partners, creating new opportunities for developers, and taking a key step toward achieving our vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem.”

Opening up Panama to free API access can be either of two things: inspired thinking or desperation. Given the huge lead time it took to deliver Panama in the first place this feels like a decision that is the former, after all nothing at Yahoo moves quickly enough to act from a position of desperation. Developers will likely pull apart the new program in the coming days and strictly from that viewpoint the offer will definitely be welcomed in the industry and could potentially throw down a stronger challenge in the quest to topple Google’s dominant Adwords platform.

Next steps for DIGG.com

One of the good things about digg regarding interaction design, is that they started with a very simple model, "thumbs up", " thumbs down" for rating community driven articles that people thought were interesting. This cool little feature made the site compelling and interactive enough that they had something they could build off of. The simplistic light graphic design of the site, makes the content approachable and easy to understand. They slowly engage you with small fades, and animations where it makes sense. I think that digg will need to make sure they do not clutter the site too much with various interactions as the site grows. They do have a testing lab where they test new items that may help digg users become more engaged, their next steps may be to spawn off another site for testing and make sure they don't disrupt the current digg experience.

Twitterfeed OpenID service

For all of those who have followed the twitter hype over the last few weeks and have not joined yet - this is your chance! A new OpenID enabled service called http://twitterfeed.com reads your blogs RSS-feed every 1-24 hours and posts your new entries to twitter. This way every blogpost can be a post on twitter too, helping you to keep people on track about what you think, do, like …