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Mozilla Persona sign-in launches in beta, skips the social networking ball and chain (video)
We all know those web pages where the only alternative to a site-specific login is a social networking account. That's not very reassuring for anyone skittish about linking their commentary to a Facebook account relatives might see, if they're even willing to join a social network in the first place. Mozilla has been aware of that hesitation long enough to have just released its long-in-development Persona sign-in service as a beta. Although it has the same kind of simple approach to a login as a Facebook or Twitter pop-up window, Persona's emphasis is on privacy: it stops paying attention the moment credentials go through, keeping any diatribes or subscription details from landing in social streams or central databases. Users don't have to play a rousing game of guess-the-username, either, as they just need to sign in with one or more familiar e-mail addresses and a single password. Persona faces an uphill battle in getting web developer adoption when the establishment sign-in services are open to hundreds of millions of internet citizens, but it does have The Times' online crossword section, OpenPhoto and Voost as early poster children -- and anything that lets the privacy-minded join the party has our vote.
OpenPhoto is an open, cloud-based photo storage alternative for iPhone
If you're furious with Flickr and peeved at Picasa, there's a new kid in town -- OpenPhoto. OpenPhoto is an open source photo sharing service along the lines of those other services, but the images are stored on Dropbox, Amazon S3, or any other cloud-storage service. It's meant to give photograph owners more control over their online photo storage, and you can even install the code on your own server is you wish. OpenPhoto was initially funded by a Kickstarter project, and the development team has reached a new milestone with the release of an iPhone app (free). The app is a bit underwhelming at the moment, but remember that this is 1.0 version. Some other bloggers have tried to compare the app to Instagram, but point out that there's no social aspect to the app or service yet. At this time, OpenPhoto is good for one thing, and that's for storing your images in the cloud. The app provides a way to upload and view your images, and there are screens for entering titles and tags to each photo. There are even some editing tools in the app from Aviary, and images can also have filters applied. If you want to do sharing with others, simply turn on the Facebook or Twitter upload capability when you're getting ready to upload an image. One major complaint about the app has been about the use of Browser.ID for login, which means that the app jumps to mobile Safari to complete the login before moving bak to the app. It's a bit confusing at first, to put it lightly. If you happen to have a lot of photos on your Mac (or PC) it's easy to drag and drop them onto the OpenPhoto page for uploading. For Dropbox users, the uploaded files may take some initial digging to find. I was expecting to find a new folder called "OpenPhoto", and eventually did -- after I found that it was in another folder called "Apps". Developer and founder Jaisen Mathai, a former Yahoo! employee, talked with Robert Scoble about the project in a long interview that can be viewed below. [via The Verge]
