Today Google announced their new Chrome OS, which is an operating system optimized for always-connected netbooks.  The OS focuses on users who already leverage web-based applications, and forgoes any native software for leveraging HTML5 and the Cloud.  While certainly an interesting concept, the OS seems more geared towards casual users who already use Google apps and don’t need to perform serious tasks offline (although Google Gears could help with this).  The OS boasts syncing with the cloud and robust security, and also boots incredibly quickly.

I spent the time to build the Chromium OS, which is the developer build.  While it was a time-consuming process, it was fairly straightforward, and instructions can be found here.  This initial build doesn’t give you much to play with, but considering that the OS isn’t planned for launch until a year from now, they have plenty of time to build this promising project into something more exciting.  Once you play around, you immediately see that Google really is cutting out the application layer to connect the browser to the kernel, and anyone who has played with Chrome will feel right at home.  Additionally, the fact that the entire OS leverages web standards, it will be interesting to see how this could help evolve various open standards initiatives.

For some  videos that explain the OS, check out the official YouTube page for the project here.

Today Google announced a single sign-on solution that is powered by OpenID. This is certainly a fantastic bit of news, and comes on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement of their intention to support the standard. In addition, Chris Messina wrote an excellent post yesterday on how we can overcome the usability problems that have marred OpenID to help the spec succeed, and how e-mail address support is critical to the success of the standard.

I completely agree on the importance of enabling e-mails as a valid OpenID, and believe that we should ultimately empower the user to enable the identifier he or she most strongly identifies with. At MySpace, we are uniquely positioned to work with OpenID because we have a user-base that already thinks of themselves as being represented by a URL. If you ask any MySpace user what their vanity URL is, there is a very good chance they’ll know it. However, beyond us and the blogging community, most users from major OP’s don’t know what their URL is, even if many of them actually already possess an OpenID. That is why, even with the excitement around Microsoft becoming an OP, a user with a valid OpenID doesn’t equal a user leveraging their OpenID. It is this disconnect that e-mail-based OpenID can help to alleviate. Further, we need to be flexible enough to include other identifiers that might emerge, such as cell phone numbers.

It is this eventual freedom to use the identifier you identify with as your OpenID that necessitates that the foundation take a more proactive role in marketing. It is only once the brand has been strengthened that users will understand that their URL, e-mail, or type foo identifier is something special. people know they have a credit card number, and they know who gives it to them, even if they aren’t being expressly asked for their “Visa” or “Mastercard”. we need that type of recognition.

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I’ve been spending this morning listening to the new (to me) Mountain Goats albums I recently picked up. Midway through “No, I Can’t. [Alternate Version]” he references a Panasonic DX4500. I didn’t know what it was, so I threw it into Google, and the search engine gave me the crazy error screen above.

I’ve never gotten this weirdness from Google, but I guess my fears that I am slowly becoming an automaton are coming true…