I’m looking forward to the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) kicking off Sydney tomorrow.

I created a FriendFeed room for OSDC Sydney, in which Ill be posting live micro-blogs into it. Ive also added a Twitter stream for anything tagged #osdc, a feed for its Google Group and a few other related feeds.

Checkout the real-time feed below:

I posted a while ago about my thoughts on the growth of Australian Politics and their use of social media. Who would have thought that today Kevin Rudd would be following me on Twitter:

Kevin already has a Facbook group and Profile, but good to see him on Twitter now. Be sure to say hello to @KevinRuddPM on Twitter.

What is it?
OpenID is a service that lets you share a single identity across many other websites. It allows you to use a single digital identity as a single sign-on for your web application. In summary - it helps reduce the amount of usernames and passwords you have to remember! OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

The beauty about OpenID is that not only does it reduce the amount of logins one has to remember, but it also allows the end-user to choose the OpenID provider that best meets their needs or the one they trust the most.

At the end of the day - no one wants, yet another, username and password to remember! Having your web application support OpenID allows you to potentially increase the number of users that use your service, because its very easy to ’sign-up’.

Has it taken off?
So how many people actually use OpenID? Well here is a quote from the official website:

OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

What Services are available?
Making big news of the last couple of days, Google has now announced they are allowing others to use Google Accounts as another OpenID option. Google just made this announcement when recently Microsoft announced their intention to enable OpenID authentication against all Live ID’s. So who else is there? Here are a list of the main big organisations that are allowing you to use their authentication services as part of your OpenID implementation:

WordPress.com, Yahoo!, SourceForge, Google, Microsoft , IBM, America Online, VeriSign….

Source:Wikipedia

There are many more as well, all available on the Open ID Wiki.

How does it work and how can I get started?
The concept of OpenID is quite simple. You go to a site or service that you want to use, instead of creating a new account, you can elect to use your credentials of an existing service you trust (assuming it supports OpenID). The website your currently on authenticates you by re-directing you to your trusted selected service, you then login, and then that service re-directs you back to the application you are using, passing you session details back to the site you first visited.

To get started, be sure to visit the OpenID Api’s website which will direct you to the many others that are using it as well as the relevant API documentation

Oh… and don’t make it sound nerdy
As techies, we often like to make things sound more complex than they are!

When you build your next web application one of the things you might want to take note of is Yahoo’s results of OpenID usability study. It showed that users did not understand OpenID and what its logo stands for. As mentioned on Read-Write-Web:

…Yahoo promoted the idea of giving users a sign-in button that simply said “Sign In with a Yahoo! ID” (though Chris Messina argues that this could be detrimental to OpenID in the long run).Google and its partners are taking a similar route and are basically bypassing any mention of OpenID itself in favor of a simple message saying “Sign in with a Google Account.”

So when you build your next web application, you might want to consider how you reference ‘OpenID’ - if you do at all. Using phrases such as “Sign in with a Google/Yahoo/Microsoft Account” might be a better way to communicate to non tech-savvy users what OpenID is.

For more information, be sure to checkout the OpenID Wiki as well as the official OpenID website.

So, I’ve been using the Gmail mobile client on my HTC mobile for a while now - running Windows Mobile. Gmail mobile is a native Java application that is not intended to directly run on a Windows OS - without some sort of MIDlet manager. Gmail Mobile is a great mobile client for Gmail giving you heaps of performance benifits, as well as caching some of your emails as well so you can access them offline.

I noticed there are quite a few posts around on the web on people having difficulty in setting Gmail Mobile on a Windows Mobile device. In particular with HTC. I found the default Winodws Mobile MIDlet Manager doesnt work with Gmail Mobile on a Windows Mobile Operating System.

So here is what I did:

This worked perfectly for me on a HTC, Windows Mobile device. Hope this helps.

Great news for webmasters who are using Google Analytics for their webstats and Google AdSence for advertising on their sites. Today Google have announced that they have commenced a staged roll-out of integration between Google Analytics and Google AdSense. Google describes the change like this:

By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.

You can watch a video overview of the features on YouTube:

More Integration?
This is great news for users who are already using both Google products. Taking it a step further, you would imagine Google will then be looking at integration for other products. They have already begun migrating FeedBurner with your Google Account.
What would happen if you eventually migrated all of FeedBurner to be a part of Google Analytics? This would give webmasters a complete view. Not only would you be able to see your website stats, but also your feed stats from one console - now that would be cool.

I blogged a while ago about how the candidates for the US Election were using Twitter as a means of promoting their campaigns. Compare this to Australian Politics and its use of Social media, and it seems to be behind the eight ball, but slowly picking up.

So what’s there at the moment in terms of Social Media and ‘Web 2.0′ stuff? Well both Liberal and Labor parties both have their own YouTube Channel’s (Liberal YouTube Channel, Labor YouTube Channel) as well as RSS Feeds (Labor RSS, Liberal RSS). They both have Facebook groups setup, with the Liberal party also linking each members Facebook profile, if they have one. MySpace also features for both parties.

What kids of numbers are we talking about here? Well not too much actually, if you checkout their respective YouTube Channels, you are talking around 600-1,500 users. Facebook groups are roughly the same, but its slowly growing.

Lately, whats really got me exited is the recent use of Twitter, similar to what has happened in the US. Only two days ago Malcolm Turnbull, who is the current Leader of the Opposition, signed up to Twitter. His Twitter name is TurnbullMalcolm, and he has already been posting updates, and responding to peoples questions! He already has alomst 500 followers in two days.

Taking it a step further, his website now features quite a bit of social media types of links - including his Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, and of course, what he is currently tweeting on Twitter.

Its going to be interesting to see how the use of social media continues to grow for politics in Australia…In the meantime, make sure you say “’sup to @TurnbullMalcolm“…

Today (October 15) is Blog Action Day. Blog Action Day is a day where all bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters and people on the web raise awareness, discuss and help change the world through focusing on an issue. Even Google is blogging about it. This years Issue is Poverty, check out the video below:

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

So what can you do about it? Well you can spread the word for starters - What I did is recorded a podcast with a friend to discuss these issues. Checkout the Instantiate Aussie Tech Podcast - Episode 2. In this episode we talk about how the web and technology world is helping you to help others! We discuss things like Kiva.org, One Laptop Per Child, Google.org, Manly to Manado (an Aussie Example!) and much more…

So I’ve been talking about this for a long time with my colleagues. We have finally started an Aussie tech podcast. Instantiate Podcast is a technology podcast where we talk about web stuff - web development, social networking, tech news and all things nerdy.

We just finished recoding episode one, where we talk about Wiki adoption tips, Gentoo Linux, Opensource supply vs demand, HTML5, iceTV, Spring Framework, Google’s 10th birthday and much more…

I just read a great post about some tips when using Hibernate in your application. Here is an overview of the tips:

Unbounded Result Set
An Unbounded Result Set is when developers might right some code to query a database without really thinking about the total number of rows that are being returned. For example:

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List myResults = catalogue.getProducts();

What happens when getProducts() returns thousands or millions of rows? Its best practice to ‘paginate’ your results. Hibernate does this well, and you can do something like this:

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Query q = sess.createQuery("from Catalogue where catalogue.products = :id")
           .setProperties(products)
           .setFirstResult(30).setMaxResults(60)
List myResults = q.list();

For more information on this, check out the Pagination section in the hibernate documentation.

Timeouts
The other tip the author gave was one that most developers (including me - I’m only just getting my head around Hibernate!) would easily miss. For our queries we should really set a transaction timeout time in case the query runs for too long. For example:

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try {
    //set transaction timeout to 3 seconds
    sess.getTransaction().setTimeout(3);
    sess.getTransaction().begin();
    ....
}catch (RuntimeException e) {
    sess.getTransaction().rollback();
    throw e; // or display error message
}
finally {
    sess.close();
}

For more information about Hibernate timeouts check out the doco.

I blogged about FriedFeed a while ago and how to get started writing your own app with the FriendFeed API, PHP and JSON. For those that don’t know, FriendFeed is essentially a ‘lifestream aggregator’ app, founded by some ex-Googlers that created Gmail.

One of the things the API was missing was the ability to get a listing of all services (without having to get actual FriendFeed entries). For example, I just want a listing of all services that are available in FriendFeed (such as Last.FM, Picassa, Google Reader, YouTube etc…). The main benefit this provides is it will allow me to write my app and pull in data for each service (instead of just getting all data from the feed, and then parsing through it all).

So I raised a feature request for this, and its great to see its now been implemented! You can now get a listing of all friendfeed services by calling their RESTfull API at http://friendfeed.com/api/services, and you will get back a JSON response with all the services. Here is a snippet of the response format:

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{ 
  "services":[
       {"url":"http://www.polyvore.com/","iconUrl":"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/icons/polyvore.png?v=8d9135930c2d29a9b5d13a3c4b936268","id":"polyvore","name":"Polyvore"},
       {"url":"http://twitter.com/","iconUrl":"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/icons/twitter.png?v=436161fcd23ab1587cfc5b96807ba5d2","id":"twitter","name":"Twitter"},
       {"url":"http://friendfeed.com/","iconUrl":"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/icons/festivus.png?v=40cd451f66084978afab17f85fa254c6","id":"festivus","name":"FestivusFeed"},
       {"url":"http://www.linkedin.com/","iconUrl":"http://friendfeed.com/static/images/icons/linkedin.png?v=a18a565c4d846c72aaf92701f10f6824","id":"linkedin","name":"LinkedIn"}...
    ]
}