mysiteonline™

While using Mon.itor.us to monitor the uptime of my websites' uptime, their IM messaging has not worked for me for quite some time now. They offer SMS messages for a fee as an alternative, but that's no fun considering it costs me $0.15 per SMS as it is. I just came across Pingie, a FREE service that will send an SMS to your phone when it encounters new posts from any feed. Lo and behold, Mon.itor.us provides an alerts feed. Yay. :)

Pingie.com

OpenID, a way for website visitors to easily identify themselves without giving up personal information, has been adopted by Yahoo, and one of Yahoo's subdivisions in Flickr. If you own an account at any Yahoo or Flickr site (mail.yahoo.com, Geocities, Flickr, Yahoo! Stocks, etc...), you can now use these accounts as an OpenID server!

What's this mean, exactly? Well, I won't get in to the technical details (or the "cool" factor), but it means, to me, that most likely other competing companies (Microsoft, Google, and a few more) will be jumping in on the bandwagon to provide OpenID (and hopefully OpenAuth) functionality. Microsoft's Live database would be easily used for this, and we all know the think tank at Google will have this soon enough - I'm actually surprised Yahoo! beat Google to the punch.

Regardless, this is good news all around.

Source: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009856.html