Plaxo’s two click signup with Google OpenId a huge hit, shows 92% success

Plaxo announces its success with the launch of its new OpenID – 2 clicks signup feature! Plaxo a trust partner of Google worked together closely to enhance user signup process…. And they did it!


As per Plaxo, the success rate of the new feature to use OpenID for signup shows 92% of success.

The goal of the Two-Click Signup initiative is simple: deliver a new user onboarding experience based on the “Open Stack” that is strictly better for all parties than traditional registration flows. And that means we want to achieve something that it is:

- better for the user by being more convenient and more secure;

- better for the identity provider by not asking the user for their password and then scraping their data; and

- better for the site by delivering a higher conversion rate on signup flows and getting more useful data from the user.

A small presentation about the analysis of Two click signup by Plaxo [By John McCrea - VP marketting, Plaxo & Joseph smarr - Chief platform architect, Plaxo].

As you have seen the slide, the two click signup is a HIT. This feature would grow as now facebook has also joined the OpenId foundation. Since many people now think about user experience other than any other hi funda stuff this surely is a huge success!!!

Watch a quick video

Stay tuned for more updates!

Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board

Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally.

In a blog post, Facebook writes “We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web.” However, the company stops short of announcing plans to either become an identity provider for OpenID, or, allowing people to use OpenID to login to Facebook.

What this move seems to be about, at least in the way that Facebook and the OpenID Foundation are spinning things, is improving the user experience of OpenID. In another blog post, Chris Messina, who is involved with the OpenID Foundation, writes, ”Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID. If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a success collaboration will put them to rest.”

Facebook’s financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company’s enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard. Facebook furthering its commitment to openness couldn’t have come at a better time to make 2009 an amazing year for OpenID and the wider social web.

Finally Yahoo! Hack Day in India (Bangalore) !!!!!!!!

I’ve applied for the Yahoo hack day and just waiting to see if i get in – hope i do

Quick info

What is hack day is all about?

ITS a FREE event, which will begin with hack-related presentations from some of the Web’s most respected developers. 24 hours of hacking on a very nice collection of tools, Yahoo!s Open Platforms, other APIs, and data, and end with awards from the sponsors plus bragging rights until the end of eternity or the next Hack Day.

When?

14th February ’09 – 15th February ’09.

Where?

The Taj Residency, Bangalore

December 4, 2008. Today may be remembered as the birth of the Social Web, as two major projects aimed at turning the Web social emerged from their restricted beta periods for general availability, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. Together, these two major events sound the death knell for the walled garden phase of social networking. Early reactions to the news are quick to frame this as a head-to-head battle between Google and Facebook, but the truth requires a look at the details, and I think something much more profound is happening…

First, the similarities. Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect share the same basic vision of the Social Web. Any site can become social, without having to build up its own social network. Users should be able to access those social features without having to experience the pain of usernames, passwords, uploading a photo, filling out a profile, importing an address book, and re-friending the people they’ve already connected with elsewhere. And, activity streams out to web-wide lifestream aggregators should become important engines of social discovery and growth for the site.

Now to the differences. One major difference between these two offerings is the technology under the hood. Google Friend Connect is built on the “open stack,” leveraging building blocks like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, whereas Facebook Connect is built on Facebook’s proprietary stack. A second difference is target market. Facebook has clearly focused on major sites, like Digg, Hulu, and CitySearch, and while simple implementations can be done with very little coding, most will involve a bit more complex development. Google, in contrast, has explicitly targeted the “long tail” of the web, sites that would never dream of writing their own social code; the focus of Google Friend Connect is to help these sites become social by cutting-and-pasting a few lines of javascript. The third major difference is one of strategy. Facebook Connect is all about making Facebook more useful to its users all over the Web. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand, is all about making the Web more social, with an approach that incorporates other social networks. For example, the current release integrates not only Orkut, but also Plaxo. (And recall that the earliest version also included Facebook, until Facebook shut that down.)

I’ve been playing around with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect all along the way while these services were being carefully tested and refined prior to today’s formal rollout. I like them both, but see lots of room for improvement. But that’s to be expected; this is a major shift in how the Web will work, and there’s a lot of complexity under the covers. Today marks the birth of the Social Web, and we should expect to see lots of rapid progress for this newborn.

As many of my readers know, the user experience (UX) for OpenID has been a source of confusion and an impediment to broader adoption. That gave rise to an OpenID UX Summit a few weeks ago, hosted by Yahoo and attended by Google, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, Facebook and many others. It also was a major focus of sessions and late-night discussion at last week’s Internet Identity Workshop. Today, we get to see some of the fruits of those efforts, as Yahoo rolls out (in a limited test) a new implementation of OpenID, currently live with just two test sites, Plaxo and Jyte; and AOL releases preview support for data portability via SREG.

Yahoo’s post describes the details:

Today, we are announcing the start of a limited test of the Simple Registration extension for the Yahoo! OpenID service. The Simple Registration extension allows OpenID RPs to request user profile data from the OpenID provider. Yahoo! will be providing Yahoo! OpenID users the ability to share the following Simple Registration fields for this initial test: Full Name, Nick Name, Email Address, Gender, Language and Timezone. The Yahoo! OpenID user will have full control on whether to share their profile data with the OpenID relying party. We will use the Yahoo! Profiles API to populate the user card which will be presented on the Yahoo! OpenID Review and Confirm page.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo also has a post on the matter, including screenshots of the improved onboarding flow. As Joseph points out, this is really something bigger than single sign-on; the key is that the identity can bring with it, at the user’s option, some of their social data. This is an important step forward for data portability:

I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It’s great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!

So, if you don’t have a Plaxo account yet, you can sign up for one with your Yahoo OpenID. If you choose to share your basic account info, you’ll land on a registration form that is pre-populated with with almost every field you need to activate your account. You only need to add your birthday and your country. (In a future release, we hope to get those last two fields as well, so we can do away with the form entirely.) Oh, and the user’s language choice will come along, too, so we can drop them into the appropriate localized version of Plaxo. Sweet!

George Fletcher of AOL also has a post on the AOL and SREG, entitled “OAuth and SREG and MapQuest! Oh My!” I’m still trying to figure out where I can go see the AOL OpenID w/ SREG live. Any pointers, anyone?

It’s great to see the pace of innovation on the Open Stack begin to accelerate.