New and improved features

Just a quick post to say we’ve added verification support for MySpace and revamped the custom account feature. You can now upload a logo for a custom account and the system automatically finds a small icon by using the sites favourite icon. Additionally you can specify a feed URL and if you select the correct type feed type (for example photo) then these photos will be available on cards that supports photos.

Hopefully this will make custom accounts easier to use and as powerful as the native account types!

OpenID delegation

When we presented at Barcamp Sheffield the most requested feature in the Q&A at the end was for OpenID delegation. The principle of OpenID delegation is that if you ever wanted/needed to change your OpenID URL going round all your web accounts and changing the URL would be a real pain. As such you can use another location as your OpenID URL which simply refers to your current OpenID account through a HTML meta tag. Then if you decided to change your OpenID provider you simply have to change the URL in one place. It’s a neat idea and is already become increasingly popular as the number of OpenID providers grows.

With idlasso you can set or change your OpenID URL on the user details page (as shown in the screenshot). Your default card at http://yourusername.idlasso.com will then do OpenID delegation for you. This is also really neat as your initial OpenID page acts as a profile with all your web accounts, rather than some standard profile page with just a name.

How to use search

By popular demand I’m going to write articles on how to use some of idlasso’s more advanced features, starting this week with search.

idlasso has a comprehensive search mechanism. You can search by:

• A persons name or username – for example “Palmer“, or “George“
• Common account names that the user may have – for example “Georgio_1999“
• A specific account on a certain service – for example “flickr:georgio_1999“

The syntax for the last option is the service name followed by a colon, followed by the username to search for on that service. You can find a list of service names we support and the string to use on our supported accounts page. Medium-Long term this will provide great opportunities for building browser plugins around the idlasso search engine – for example a plugin that detects when you are viewing a flickr profile that has been registered on idlasso. This could then display the users card so you can quickly navigate to their other web accounts or contact them.

idlasso also provides a series of finer controls over how you appear in search results. Firstly you can turn search for your profile on or off by going to your account settings page. If off this will stop you occurring in any search results as well as the user directory. If turned on it uses a sensible default of only exposing your username and real name to the public. All you other remaining information is only searchable by friends. This works really well as your friends can find more information on you whereas random internet surfers can’t.

Secondly you can fine control the search even more by using the search permission links on the manage accounts, manage resources and user details pages. This will allow you to choose public, private or friends access rights for each bit of data (see screenshot). Although the defaults work well for most users you may want to expose some of your accounts to the public or keep some private from search. This option allows you to do this.

So the idlasso search provides many ways for you to find users and many ways to control how you appear in the results. One final note is it can take upto 24 hours for any changes to appear in the search engine, but if you’re desperate to have it immediately you can turn search off for your profile and then turn it on again.

Network issues

I’m not sure where in the world is having a few network issues but we’ve noticed requests to myopenid.com and AIM instant messaging are timing out (as of 11am, UK time). So if you are trying to register with openid or add an AIM account please be patient! In the meantime I’ll make sure we get some more useful error messages into the application!