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Can Sears Help OpenID Go...

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.

Customers will also get access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.

For the integration, Sears teamed up with Viewpoints Network, a social technology and media company that recently integrated JanRain’s RPX solution into their online community and identification platform.

The question is: is Sears - despite its claims of driving innovation in online retailing, which seems a bit over the top - merely a late adopter looking to try something new or is this a sign of OpenID maturing to a point where it can finally reach that tipping point where it really starts taking off with a mainstream audience?

In my recent interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina, he expressed the hope that integrations outside the technology industry - such as the U.S. government - would at some point occur more often, but he also acknowledged that the initiative struggles with branding and getting the word out there.

It’s integrations like these that could really help OpenID gain more traction, but the main question will always be if OpenID is just a solution looking for a problem, or if there’s a genuine need for a decentralized, universal login standard.

Despite the flood of criticism from technology pundits, the jury’s still out on that.

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Once Again, Twitter Trending...

Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a search for the less appropriate trending topic, not a single result pops up (for now).

Update: ok apparently it’s a legitimate trending topic (see origin here, it was meant as a tribute to British comic actress Mollie Sugden on the occasion of her death, so fans, celebrities and Brits in general started to tweet it) but Twitter is just blocking search results from appearing (which is good).

This may seem like something mundane at first glance, but many people (including reporters worldwide) track Twitter trending topics for breaking news, and it worries me that they can be manipulated. I mean, it’s one thing if large groups of people arrange for certain terms to show up in Twitter’s trending topics, but it’s a whole other story when they can be gamed with a hack (see update above).

(hat tip to Samuel Ryan)

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Worldwide, Russians Spend...

comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time - once again - confirming Vkontakte.ru's leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors. To put that level of 'engagement' in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.

New Logo For MySpace: No...

From the “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic file”: The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (”we have…laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace”). And they’re delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed the MySpace logo. No longer does it say “MySpace.com - A Place For Friends.” Now it simply says MySpace. The old logo is below.

We’ve confirmed that the change just occurred this evening, although MySpace PR is as usual not responding. They refuse to confirm that the logo is new, or say why they changed it. It sure is absurd to have a conversation that goes something like “So it looks like you’ve changed your logo this evening? No Comment. Uh huh. Ok, so any official reason why you changed it? No comment.” Trade secrets, I guess. And heck, I’m just happy someone still works there to pick up the phone.

MySpace is also on the warpath to get more users. At login they now strongly suggest you log into your email and invite friends (hopefully they’ll avoid turning this too spammy). And they’ve also added the “people you may know” feature as a widget to all logged in profile pages.

We’re also hearing that MySpace will be removing some of the ugliest ad units that adorn the site today. Whether that’s an effort to clean up the user interface or simply a sign of slowing ad sales, we’ll probably never know.

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