I’ve started encountering Web pages where the OpenID and Microsoft Information Card/CardSpace, logos sit side by side. Actually, that’s a blatant lie. I think I saw one once, but can’t find it again. Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to show folks both logos and see what they thought and by “folks” I didn’t mean Web 2.0 junkies, rather real people, the kind Gavin does a great job of reminding us about, and who typically don’t have a polarised view of Microsoft.

Now this evidence is obviously unscientific and highly anecdotal, but of the three sets of people I tested, nobody recognised either, and I didn’t tell them what they were for, all preferred Randy’s OpenID logo and uniformly everyone decided the Infocard “shiny splodge” was the obvious result of a corporate following their conventional Usual Design Process.

Another interesting aspect came from comparing the URIs for downloading the icons. OpenID went with the rather predictable openid.net/logos, but the best I could find for the Information Card is the gloriously enterprisey www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ce99e033-39a8-4bc5-9014-60ed0b560d0e&displaylang=en, obviously an artifact of tooling which doesn’t care so much about people’s esthetics, memories, sides of busses, or even shower heads, but locking publishers in and hiding them from silly inconsequential details such as The Web. You can fully expect that URI to morph into a different value soon, killing your bookmarks and this blog post. It looks decidedly uncool.

Please, by all means, dismiss this post as me being a flippant kitten, but it’s all a matter of taste, and taste matters.

Most of the vision of the Web for 2008 seems to be coming true, which means it was either highly portent or most likely, already advent. I’ll do a full round up at the end of the year, but in the meantime let me game the game by pimping one of the laggards: Site Specific Browsers. In the prediction, I cited Prism and Fluidapp already, which in essence build a browser for a single site, giving you a separate icon in your taskbar. Then there are the full sized widgets, applications dedicated to reskinning a site Mailplane for reading SPAM, eBay desktop for finding scammers and Twiteriffic for frittering your life away.

All fine and dandy, but wasn’t really what I was getting at. A few months ago. A friend, who shall remain nameless, was showing me something cool on his laptop. As he typed the web address into Safari I remarked on the risk of, ahem, interesting URIs dropping down, to which he joked “don’t worry, I always use Firefox to surf for pr0n”. That joke revealed two great user stories:

• Firstly, performing all your internet banking in a Site Specific Browser is a great idea if that browser is tied to a single bank’s site and sandboxes your passwords, cookies, cache and history from other instances of the browser or widgets.
• Secondly, a “Task” or “Subject Specific Browser”, an instance of your current browser you flag for researching “butterflies”, Muppet Death Metal, or whatever, which then collects a compartmentalised subject specific cache and history for later mining, or cleansing, would be useful. Really useful.

Do such things already exist? Yes or no, expect them to be big!

I also like the 25 words writing project, enough to overcome, and air, my current malaise:

In front of a Web connected computer he can change the world with vigor, instead chronic procrastination means life is frittered away, page refreshing Twitter.