The Next Web

Jimdo: Pages AND OpenID to the people

Written on June 23, 2008 – 3:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Remember the little OpenID incident at Next08 in May? I promised Andreas Stephan from Six Groups that I would blog about his service, if he would make OpenID support his top priority. Well, so it happened, and on June 6th, Six Group integrated OpenID login. Apparently, that has inspired another big German start-up as well, since Oliver Moser from Jimdo mailed me that his service also supports OpenID now.

Jimdo is an online Ajax-based website builder, which makes it easy for basically anyone to create a slick-looking page - sort of like an online iWeb. Their list of widgets is impressive, and Alexa tells us the service has been steadily growing. Here’s what Oliver has sent me:

From today on we’re supporting OpenID - but not as a provider, just as a host. Jimdo-users can now sign into their Jimdo-Page with their OpenID. But more important, they can use their personal Jimdo-Domain as an OpenID, even though Jimdo is not the provider. So if they comment on a blog post they can use their own domain - which of course makes a lot of sense.

You may wonder why Jimdo doesn’t act like a provider. Oliver has an answer to that question too: “There are already so many of then, so there’s no need for Jimdo being an additional one. And since OpenID enables Dataportability, we can actually make great use of it.”

Last week, some people at Supernova said OpenID and Dataportability have just become press releases machines. I can see why they say that, but I also think that it doesn’t hurt anyone (apart from our email inbox) since more and people will get familiar with the idea of open data. Also the less web-savvy ones, like most of the Jimdo users.

I hope you like that post!

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Authentication, dataportability, germany, jimdo, openid, six groups

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Six Groups: “one community on the go please”

Written on May 15, 2008 – 11:20 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

When you own a blog, you’re probably always looking for ways to create a bond with your readers. If your readers feel connected to you, they’ll probably comment and read more. Not to mention the power of word of mouth. A good way to create this sort of commitment is an integrated social network. There are several Wordpress plugins offering extra functions with a social network feel to it, yet it takes a lot of time, knowledge and effort to modify them to your needs. So I’m glad to tell you a new start-up has come along which offers an instant community for your convenience.

Patrick, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and undersigned

German-based Six Groups has developed an easy tool that allows you to include a community by just copy/pasting a javascript snippet. This adds a bar at the top of your page, showing a community lifestream, the number of users that are online and a sign-up button. You can customize the design by selecting a theme. As a user you have access to the regular social networks features, like a wall, lifestream and a personal library for photos and text documents. All in all, it’s a pretty neat community solution for bloggers and site owners who don’t have the budget for a totally-customized social network.

I met the Six Groups founders last night at the Facebook Developer Garage after party in Hamburg. They’re presenting at the Next08 conference today and already have an alpha version of their tool running on the Next08 site (So check that one out). When I was talking to co-founder Andreas Stephan, I immediately started thinking about the “yet another sign-up page”-tiredness. I’ve signed up to enough social networks already. So I said to him I’d only blog about his start-up if he promised to support OpenID. He did, so let’s see whether Six Groups lives up to it.

communities, next08, six groups, social networks, wordpress

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