Today's release introduced a lot of new features - both visible and invisible ones. Among the invisible ones are support for more phone brands and types, faster synchronization and automatic Flickr account discoverability for contacts. They are significant improvements and deserve a post each, but this time I'll tell you about the new visible features instead.

OpenID

It is now possible to sign in and sign up using OpenID. All existing users can also login using their OpenID and then associate the OpenID with the existing account.  That means you don't lose any contacts or events because everything stays the same, except you can now use OpenID to authenticate yourself.

FriendPlayer

During the last months, our product and design team has been experimenting with different ways of showing what your contacts have been up to. First came the Friendstream, which was a graphical representation of the usual date sorted list of status updates and events. Now, they came up with a Friendplayer, which is very unique and give you a brilliant way of getting the latest updates from your contacts. It looks a bit like a cross between the Friendstream and a video player.

Public API

On zyb.com/feeds you can see a list of all  the different kind of information and formats you need to create mash-ups or third-party integrations. Currently we support 6 different formats and you can retrieve contacts, calendar events, SMS'es and activities on the Life- and FriendPlayer. The formats are RSS, JSON, FOAF, SIOC, VCard and VCalendar.

The information is protected by a special key that only the account owner knows, but is free to distribute. The key can be changed easily, which will render all the old URLs useless.

Hyves social network

We've added support for the Hyves social network, primarily used in the Netherlands. This means that Hypes users can now import thumbnail pictures and other information from their friends on Hyves, and merge them with the contacts on the phone.  Most Sony Ericsson devices support contact thumbnail synchronization, so you get a nice picture displayed on the phone when a friend calls.

Performance improvements

Using YSlow and Fiddler to monitor the network traffic, we have made huge improvements in the website performance. By using the right cache strategies we were able to reduce the amount of data a user needed to download significantly. Also, zyb.com relies heavily on the use of JavaScript and we have worked very hard on optimizing the code for better performance. Performance optimization is still very high on our to-do list the next 1½ month, so expect to see the site getting faster and faster during that period.

Finally, I just want to wish you happy ZYBbing and I hope you will enjoy the new features as much as we did implementing them.

The ZYB team is in the process of implementing OpenID right now. It’s working on our development servers and we can both sign in and sign up using OpenID. It will be released very soon. If you don't know what OpenID is, take a look at this short video.

We are doing this for three reasons:

Reason 1. The community

For some time now, the ZYB community has been asking for OpenID login support. Since most of the developers at ZYB use OpenID, we totally understand why you want this on zyb.com. Keep on asking us to implement cool features. The more requests we receive, the higher priority they get on our roadmap. Feature requests can be posted here in the comments.

Reason 2. Data portability

The second reason for implementing OpenID is that it correlates with our efforts in supporting data portability. It’s your data we’re storing, so you should be able to take it with you wherever you go on the web. It’s the same with OpenID. It’s your credentials, so you should be able to use them anywhere.

Reason 3. It's the future

We are very sure that OpenID will be the standard way of authentication on the web in the future. By implementing OpenID we also help speed up the adoption rate and thereby brings the future a little bit closer.

The user experience

When you visit zyb.com and have to sign in, you can either choose to use your existing username/password or sign in using OpenID. The first time you're using OpenID we will ask you whether or not you wish to create a new ZYB account or to assign your OpenID to an existing account. If you wish to do that, then you have to enter your username/password once. Now you are able to use your OpenID to login to your existing account.

If you wish to create a ZYB account you can easily do that without entering your name or e-mail address like you normally would. We retrieve that info automatically from your OpenID provider. This makes it really fast to create a new account and you will be flying in a matter of seconds.