Yesterday Yahoo! launched a new service, Yahoo Suggestion Board, which placed user generated suggestions for Yahoo’s various services/ portals into a “Digg Like” voting site. The Digg mafia on the other hand went mental, defacing the new Yahoo service with immature messages such as Digg rules, Digg clone, don’t copy Digg and other stuff rubbish. In light of the vitriol expressed by users of Digg that Yahoo somehow copied or stole the voting premise, in a similar way the very same people carried on when Netscape was relaunched, let’s consider the notion that Digg is an original idea itself.

It isn’t.

Did Kevin Rose invent voting? Did Kevin Rose invent the concept of democracy, even if we all know that Digg at best is a festering, rotten and corrupt democracy reminiscent of Soviet Russia (remember, everyone voted in the USSR, it was the choice of leaders that was limited).

No, Kevin Rose didn’t.

According to Wikipedia, democracy is agreed to have had its roots from Aristotle, with Ancient Greece having the first recorded democracy of any shape or form.

According to Digg users, is Kevin Rose Aristotle? I wonder how many digg’s that concept would receive?.

Of course the history of democracy and voting has evolved much since ancient Greece. Our modern democracy (both in the US, UK and Australia) has its roots in the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which followed the Glorious Revolution. The founding fathers of the United States stole the idea of bicameral rule when establishing Indepedence in 1788, and other countries have followed the leads of both the United Kingdom and the United States, often in a combination of both systems (Australia’s Washminister system of Government).

Maybe Kevin Rose was secretly behind all of this?

Switching to the online world, voting and online polls have been common on the web since roughly 1994-95, indeed I can remember using 3rd party polling on a website I owned in 95. Did Kevin Rose create all of this?

Digg is a variation on the democratic theme, as is Netscape, as it Yahoo Suggestions, Reddit or any other of the similar sites out there. Digg does not and will never hold an exclusive right nor license to voting online. If this is indeed what Digg users are suggesting, lets all rally against Digg for stealing the idea from Aristotle, the leaders of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the founding fathers of the United States, to name but a few :-)

Tags: Digg, Yahoo Suggestions

Originally posted on February 15, 2007 @ 6:07 pm

AOL has announced the roll out of OpenID to its entire user base, some 63 million users.

OpenId is a community/ open effort to establish a decentralized user identity database that allows users to login to different sites, in a similar way to Microsoft’s previously (failed) efforts with Passport, where as currently user logins/ IDs are established on a per site basis. For example, an OpenID might log you in to your email account with Yahoo, reader with Bloglines and Adwords account with Google, at least in theory anyway, where as currently you require an account at each.

Despite the occasional noise from pundits, particularly in the open source community, to date OpenID has not been adopted in any great way, mostly due to the failure of large sites/ companies to embrace the concept, after all, why adopt OpenID if hardly anyone is using it?

AOL’s embrace of OpenID changes the game considerably, after all 63 million users literally overnight now have OpenID’s they can use at other sites. Imagine the possibilities from a marketing perspective knowing that you can now offer immediate access to a closed/ private service to 63million AOL users. AOL signing up to OpenID could well be the tipping point that drives OpenID adoption across a broad range of sites because simply it now makes economic sense to do so, it becomes a sales/ marketing tool instead of just a plain old boring ID thing.

On the flip side, AOL sites/ products currently do not accept OpenID logins, however they are “actively working on it”. As some one who does not currently have an account at AOL, nor use any of its services, I’d be a whole lot more likely to check AOL out when they adopt OpenID, as I’d think were others….and don’t for one minute think that AOL doesn’t know this either.

 

Tags: AOL, OpenID

Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 7:59 pm