Janrain Blog

How many Janraineers (and friends of Janrain employees) does it take to run 197 miles from Mt. Hood west to the Oregon coast?  Fueled by gatorade and plenty of Advil, 12 runners, 2 drivers and 2 vans from Team Janrain participated in the annual Hood to Coast relay last weekend, finishing 270th out of the more than 900 teams that entered. 

Now in its 29th year, Hood to Coast pits 12,000 runners against the diverse Oregon terrain, heat, fatigue and sleep deprivation that goes with a nearly 200-mile relay race spread over 2 days.  It is billed as one of the largest relay races in the world.

Did you know a new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second? That is a lot of professionals with LinkedIn profiles who could use them to login to your website. In February, we made it easy for websites to offer sign-ups using LinkedIn accounts and in May, we added the ability to share user activity on a site with their connections on LinkedIn. Today, we are excited to announce several feature enhancements to Janrain Engage’s LinkedIn support.

In January and April of this year, we shared data on which social network or email identities people use to sign-in to websites and their preferred social networks for sharing their online activities. Today, Mashable published an update of our data.

Publications such as Mashable, TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb frequently report on new services and features launched by major social networks and web portals like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo!. In an increasingly competitive landscape, these providers of online identity are furiously working to differentiate their offerings to reach a larger audience and build sustained loyalty among existing users.  For marketers, digital strategists and developers managing websites for their online businesses, this has two major implications:

• It has become critical to understand the tools offered by these networks and how they can be leveraged to benefit your website and improve your online ROI. Implementing these tools on your corporate website can give your organization a huge competitive advantage.
• Because the networks are differentiating their features (and the plumbing and APIs for these features) so rapidly, it has become increasingly challenging to incorporate these tools into your website on your own. Hosted solutions that aggregate features from each network in a write to one, add support for many model can connect your site to the social networks quickly, saving you time and money while freeing you from ongoing maintenance and optimization.

Our partner, Vincent Lauria of Tal.ki, contributed this post for today:

We've been running on the Janrain platform for over half a year now. We use Janrain Engage to allow for third-party logins, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. When we first built our product, Tal.ki Embeddable Forums, we made the conscious decision to not build our own user login system, we wanted to go the third-party route, this had two advantages:

1. Less development time to get to market
2. A seamless experience for forums embedded across thousands of sites, no need to signup and create a new profile each time, just hop in and join the conversation.