SXSW: A Critical Look at OpenID

Ryan Janssen has an excellent summary of the OpenID panel I sat in on at SXSW:

I actually made my way through the labyrinth that is SXSW to one of the lesser rooms about 15 minutes early (WAY early in SXSW time). To my shock, the room was already packed (300-500 people). Even more telling, this was a very sophisticated 300-500 people. I would guess that about a quarter were implementing or looking to implement identity solutions in some form or another. In other words, this space is SCALDING hot.

SXSW Report: A Critical Look at OpenID

Doubleclick gets the Google treatment, meet Ad Manager

Now that Google and Doubleclick have finally tied the knot, they’ve unwrapped what looks like a very compelling new product called Google Ad Manager, Wired’s Compiler has a short article on the service:

While Google AdSense offers fully automated ads based on your page’s content, the new Google Ad Manager is designed to help you manage and sell custom ads to companies of your choice.

Think of Ad Manager as a dashboard for controlling your own ad empire.

It looks as is Google has taken Doubleclick’s existing Revenue Center and given it the Google treatment.  They’ve taken explicit steps to make the tool easier to use for small companies with even smaller media departments.  Let me just say right now that I think a tool like this is going to be insanely great for small to medium sized advertising agencies.  From the official Google Blog:

Google Ad Manager is a free, hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user experience with Google speed and a tagging process so publishers can spend more time working with their advertisers and less time on their ad management solution. And by providing detailed inventory forecasts and tracking at a very granular level, Ad Manager helps publishers maximize their inventory sell-through rates.

Right now, you can sign up to receive an invitation when the service goes completely live; I can’t wait to see if it works for our team here at Stone Ward.

Innovation comes cheap

Innovation comes cheap, says Google engineer Kevin Marks | The Social – CNET News.com

Now it does sound fantastic, because you’ve got to invest a lot of time and money to do something, so why would you start a business that way? Part of the point of this Web stuff is it’s lowering the barriers to entry. You can build an application much more easily. You can put something up and see if people like it or not, and tweak it. One of the points of OpenSocial is to make that stuff even easier because you can build an application without having your own server, you can run it inside the social network itself, you can let it store data in the social network’s site, and later on you can decide, “OK, this is interesting, I’ve got a bunch of users in this app, I should connect them to an external server, I should work out ways of serving advertising or something.”