Web App: Juvely

With Keepsy being our new toy I wanted to implement something unique that is completely different to anything that is around at the moment. I was thinking about doing something different about registration, after-all nobody else wants yet another username and password to remember do they? I was thinking of completely abolishing the password but this seemed a bit far-fetched so in the end I decided OpenID was a better option.

OpenID originally looked like a very promissing technology but things haven’t turned out well for it, although adoption is growing by the big companies. Last week I spent about 6 hours trying to find an implementation of a consumer (the application) that works with Rails 2.0. Eventually I came across this and I thought, yay, I can get this implemented on Keepsy within a couple of hours. I then did some more reasearch on the best practices, and in the end decided to avoid OpenID.

My main reason was because so many sites have poor implementations of it and users are just going to get confused. Possibly the worse case is the Beast forum. In order to use an OpenID to login to a forum you need to register with a username and password, kind of defeats the point no? 37signals have done slightly better with the signup process for their Basecamp application, you can choose to use an OpenID instead of a username or password but still it isn’t brilliant. What if people don’t know what an OpenID is (most internet users)? Although they provide a link for information people really aren’t going to bother clicking. The main problem I believe is the name ‘OpenID’. It provides no indication as to what it is, something like ‘universal login’ would be a better choice. You can also argue that Microsoft’s Passport platform (does that still exist?) suffers from the same problem, but that has exposure through services such as Hotmail and Windows.

Anyway, back to my original argument about poor implementations. Brian Ellin has done an excellent job redesigning the OpenID login page for Pibb, but I think it could go further, especially on sites that support OpenID and traditional logins. My idea is to have a login page that has all this OpenID stuff at the top, and then at the bottom the tradional username / password and registration stuff. If the user enters an OpenID that doesn’t exist on the system, then they are shown a basic registration form (prepopulated using the simple registration extension) asking for whatever data you need (i.e. displayname and email if you must). Once confirmed they are logged in and are using you app within 30 seconds of visiting the homepage. Its simple, as OpenID should be!

Anyway, thats my two pence on OpenID! Hopefully one day the problem we be solved, but until then, no OpenID for Keepsy!

Just a quick announcement to say that Keepsy is alive, and has been for the past week! We have been too busy implementing new features to announce its alive! Woops… Anyway, it isn’t officially launched yet but if you want a sneeky peek then head over to http://www.keepsy.com/!

So much for our 5 days from idea to launch, it did seem a bit extreme but I am glad we have got something up and available for everyone to try. We are trying to embrace the ‘Getting Real’ approach by releasing early and releasing often. Keepsy is so much smaller than Juvely that we decided rather than having two versions running on the server (production and development), whenever something is committed to the repository it is updated on the live version of Keepsy. This aids in bug fixes as if we need to fix any on the live version of Juvely we need to SSH into the server and run a few commands, where as for Keepsy we just need to commit! I expect we will change this as it grows, but that does mean for now you may experience a few bugs…

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!