There should be an open standard for user authentication, profile and relationship data (friends, colleagues, family, etc.). It shouldn’t matter if this information is stored with Google+, Facebook, Twitter, privately or anywhere else.

Why would I need to register or log-in to access a web site or app. This should be handled by the desktop or the browser. A website can request to display the data to personalise my experience — but the information isn’t stored (duplicated) with the site. My personal information on web-app.com is little more than a number and a reference to the standards based personal data store of my choice. I don’t need to register, login or grant access to each app, just my desktop or browser. The information I choose to share, how much and with whom, is under my control at that single location.

The Twitter / Facebook / OpenID logins go some of the way but are much less than what I have in mind. Opening a web app should be like opening a desktop app. Like personalising my window borders and colours, I don’t need to that for every new application. I shouldn’t have to do it when I “follow” someone on the world wide web either. When I want to share or collaborate, my contacts list is loaded from my contacts list, not the one I’ve spent another few hours building on another new service.

Anyone working towards that? I’m looking at OpenSocial and Mozilla’s BrowserID but unless I’m mistaken they don’t seem to be quite what I’m talking about either.

(if you want to comment, I’ve also posted this on Google+).

Ever read an article and think it could have been written exclusively about you? For me, this post from CarlKingCreative.com is one of those: 10 Myths About Introverts.

I’ve always known I wasn’t a very good extrovert but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the traits of the introverted listed and explained (or explained away) in a positive light before. It’s nice to think of these things as something to embrace and work with, rather than work against.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.” — John Lennon

Enjoying some Ian Brown at the moment. My Way is a great album. This isn”t from it, but this is great too.

Ian Brown – F.E.A.R.

I have, of course, listened to an awful lot more music than this in the past twelve months – but I don’t scrobble all the time. Apart from the numbers though, this list is probably accurate enough.

So, according to my Last.fm profile, this is what I have been mostly listening to in the past 12 months.

Pos. – ARTIST – # Tracks Played

1 – Kings of Leon – 286
2 – The Beatles – 229
3 – Radiohead – 219
4 – Vangelis – 214
5 – The American Analog Set – 86
6 – Philip Glass – 82
7 – Beirut – 75
8 – Rage Against the Machine – 43
9 – Led Zeppelin – 37
10 – The Flaming Lips – 32
11 – The Redneck Manifesto – 31
12 – Calexico – 29
13 – Nirvana – 27
14 – R.E.M. – 26
15 – Air – 23

Having previously struggled with the documentation (or lack thereof) for the CakePHP Framework, looked briefly at Zend and even dabbled with Ruby On Rails (not knowing much about the underlying language – Ruby – I decided this wasn’t my best in-road to MVC), it was finally CodeIgniter which served as my first real introduction to web frameworks and the Model/View/Controller way of doing things.

I’m naturally hesitant to put something on a pedestal and evangelise without having truly sampled the alternatives – maybe Cake starts to teach itself after the first hurdle… perhaps it really is worth learning a new language to unlock the power of Rails… and Zend? It could be worth more than a cursory glance – but in the past few months at least, CodeIgniter has been good to me.

After a lot of mucking about, a couple of false starts and much reading up on the excellent User Guide and wiki, CodeIgniter became the framework of choice for the latest project – Crewger.

Crewger is a networking, project management, and exhibition site tailored towards both traditional and what we like to call ‘new’ Irish filmmakers – those that, like us, see the Internet a great opportunity for film.

With this specific target, what I didn’t want to do is what I’ve done for more general online communities in the past and mould the website around a pre-built Content Management System. This certainly works in a lot of cases (I remain on good terms with the humble CMS) but for Crewger I wanted something much more flexible. I wanted to create the tool or resource which I knew should exist, not simply re-iterate whatever I can find that’s out there already.

And at the same time, why reinvent the wheel?

The nature of a framework like CodeIgniter, Rails or CakePHP, means it makes light work of the more common tasks while not holding your hand all the way to a finished website. Common tasks taken care of, you’re free to use your programming skills to concentrate on the not so common… all those cool things that make your application special. For someone with more imagination than patience when it comes to building new things, this one’s a no brainier.

And while I may in future look elsewhere for my framework fix — perhaps to the recent ‘more open’ fork from the CodeIgniter project, KohanaPHP — for now at least, and for Crewger, CodeIgniter is kicking ass.

The CMS is dead? Long live the Framework.