Archive for category Trends
More OpenID news
Posted by Brad Rowley in Google, Microsoft, Trends on March 12th, 2009
Fresh on the heels of my earlier post…
Microsoft has a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the OpenID Window Live Provider that allows you to associate an OpenID alias with your Windows Live login. With Google and Microsoft both heavily supporting OpenID, the reality of having a single signon for all your web accounts is getting closer to reality.
For more information, check out the news releases at OpenID and the Window Live ID blog.
Google Friend Connect and Other Goodies
Posted by Brad Rowley in Google, Trends on March 12th, 2009
Google has recently released another slice of Google Friend Connect. The Friend Connect API allows you to access the core features of Friend Connect to integrate into your web site.
This API gives you a few tools to increase traffic to your site and build it into a community though social networking. It utilizes open services like OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial to authenticate visitiors to your web site.
Google offers this exciting social networking tool (and others) over at their Social Web blog. If you’re feeling brave you can download and test plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Phpbb over at Google Code.
Free Virtualization Software
Posted by Brad Rowley in Software, Trends on March 9th, 2009
Have you ever wanted to test out new operating system software like Linux or OpenSolaris, but don’t want to dual boot your machine or reformat your drive. Try virtualization software.
Virtualization software allows you to create a virtual machine, a computer within a computer.
You can download one of the following free VM products:
- VirtualBox: This product is provided by Sun and can run different flavours of Linux, Windows and Solaris. The big benefit here is that VirtualBox also runs on OS X, Linux and OpenSolaris
- VirtualPC: This Microsoft product is limited to Windows and OS/2 platforms, but integrates better with the host system.
- VMWare Player: This application can only run images created by VMware’s commercial products. However, if you do a quick Google, you can find a number of sites that you can download free (and legal) VM images from.