Sometimes OpenID and discussions about it seem so serious, sometimes academic, and sometimes even stupid. Where is the fun? A more casual app for playing around with? Well, if you like beer, it exists: 97 Bottles.
97 Bottles is only dealing with beer. Users can write reviews about their favourite beers, connect with their friends, and even learn more about beer along the way. But what’s so interesting about 97 Bottles that we feature it here, you might ask? Well, 97 Bottles is a relying party, so new users can simply log in to it with their OpenID and create a new account. Users can also create an acocunt by logging in with a username and password. But why should people do that when having an OpenID?
After logging in users can associate the OpenID with an exisiting account or create a new one. It is really good practice that relying parties allow users to associate an OpenID to an existing account later on. Unfortunately, some services don’t do this which is rather frustrating.
As you can see I don’t need to enter my email address and username anymore because 97 Bottles asked for it during authentication and got that data from my OpenID Provider. Of course, the site also features user profiles and unfortunately, the user experience could be better here. Below are screenshots from the profile form:
Most of those form fields could be filled with data from my OpenID Provider (via the Simple Registration extension, or see our Technical Terms). I don’t know why 97 Bottles doesn’t make use of that data. It’s really unnecessary to ask for it.
Though apart from full support for the Simple Registration extension, 97 Bottles is a nice little site which is a lot of fun. Also for the more tech-savvy users, 97 Bottles supports the hCard microformat - hReview would be nice as well, though, but it’s still in beta, so that might change - and makes it easy to find people’s friends.
Check it out if you like beer!
4 Comments
Hey Carsten, thanks for the great write-up. I know the crew here at Blue Flavor know about your post. I’ll be sure to address some of the issues with them that you mentioned here, specifically the Simple Registration extension.
We looked into hReview but choose to not use it at this time as it’s still in draft format. We are also not sure why hReview decided to force everyone into a 5 point rating system. Let’s face it, there are a lot of beers out there and some are just slightly better than others, so we went with a 100 point rating system. Let’s hope they change that to be more flexible before it becomes a finalized microformat specification.
Thanks for the comment, Nick. hReview is just a suggestion, of course. But featuring reviews on the site and also hCards, hReview was just logical to me. But I certainly see your point, although rating is not required in hReview and can be omitted.
Also, may I suggest XFN if people are friends, i.e. following is mutual?
I think we are looking into XFN, but it’s really the call of the project manager and developer. I trust you have already made these suggestions (XFN, hReview, Simple Reg Ext, etc) already via the site’s beta feedback? If not, I would highly recommend you do that.
Thanks,
- Nick
Ah, Uservoice for feedback. Nice. I just suggested SREG, though hReview was suggested already but turned down: