I've had a regular Eye Fi card for a while, but I recently ordered an upgrade to the Eye Fi Explore, which is so far a pretty interesting experience.

The Eye Fi card is a simple little device. It looks and behaves mostly like a regular 2GB SD memory card, but if you go through an initialization process, the card has a single special feature that regular SD cards don't: It will upload your photos to your computer via your home wireless network.

It's a simple little thing, but it makes getting photos to your computer much less tedious than having to remove the card from the camera or hook your camera to the computer. You just leave your camera on and it transmits the photos to your PC -- Easy as pie. The software even lets you configure multiple photo sites to which it will upload your photos after they've been transferred. The upgraded Explore version of the card offers two additional features that are well worth paying the premium price.

The first extra feature is the one they talk about a lot. Using nearby wireless networks, the card is able to determine your location on the planet and store that information with the photo. This does not use GPS, but a GPS-alternative technology that is not quite as accurate, but can work better indoors.

Online services can extract the coordinate information from your photos and use them to place your photos on a map. This is actually a pretty handy feature, and it's at least interesting to know where you were when you took a photo, if not be able to aggregate your photos into the collective geographic photostream.

The location features are pretty accurate for a device so small, but certainly not as accurate as a real GPS receiver. Even though it works with secured networks, you're still relying on wireless networks for your position information, so the location data only covers urban areas. Taking photos on a hiking trip might not give you the data you're expecting. For photos that the Eye Fi can't determine coordinates for, it works the same, just without the stored coordinate data.

It's also interesting that the Eye Fi - in spite of taking photos at several different, although nearby, locations - seemed to stack some photos all into the same location. For example, I took a few photos around Philadelphia, and although I moves a few blocks between the photo sets, they all showed up in the same general area. It at least got the vicinity correct, which is better than the utter lack of geographic info I had before, but as I moved from historical location to historical location (easy to do in Old City), it was stacking all of those photos in the same place. It would be hard to know which thing I was taking photos of solely based on the photo coordinate data.

I was happy to find that during a recent visit to Western Pennsylvania, the Eye Fi easily detected my location and attached it to the photos. It was in an area that I really did not expect to get good location information due to the lack of saturation of wifi, but it turns out that I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did it notice my location, but it was tagged fairly accurately, within about 100 feet.

The second thing that the card does, which they don't talk about as much, is allow you to connect to public wireless networks to upload your photos. This is, in my opinion, a strange oversight in the original model.

In the original model, you must configure every network that you want to use with the card. This lets you use private networks, but it also prevents you from using public networks. With the Explorer, you can configure the card to securely transmit your photos to your computer (via the Eye Fi service and software) over any public wifi network, including the Waypath network that is used for internet access at many restaurants, including McDonalds.

Uploading from anywhere seems pretty useful, but I haven't really seen or noticed it happen yet. I'm still trying to work out how I would really know whether it uploaded while I was remote or not. I would have to pay more attention, I guess.

What is great is that someone is thinking about how to improve what looked like a pretty straightforward, finished technology. That's something I appreciate.

I'm at the knowledge level of knowing enough about OpenID to get my foot lodged in my mouth very easily, so please (please, please) correct me if I've got something wrong because I'd really like to work this out.

I signed up for a Zooomr account months ago, and haven't really used it since. I did not use it because I was happy with my Flickr account. During those long months after having tried out the photo sharing service with too many Os, two things happened.

First, I became angry with Flickr for having to use my Yahoo ID to log in. I don't think it was necessarily the "sky is falling" event that I worried about, but I still really dislike having to sign in as "ringmasterow" (Yahoo ID) rather than "ringmaster" (Flickr ID), almost as much as having to use "/asy" instead of "/ringmaster" as my Flickr URL because Flickr attributes no value to their usernames at all. Grr.

Second, I completely forgot what OpenID service I used to log in to Zooomr. At the time, I'm sure that I didn't have OpenID on this domain. At that point, I either used a service or installed a sketchy WordPress plugin to implement an OpenID server based on WP logins. Either way, I'm not sure what my Zooomr OpenID account is.

Since then, I've tried to switch from Flickr to Zooomr due to my dislike of the whole Yahoo debacle. But I can't because I don't know how to log in to Zooomr via OpenID.

I've looked at my profile from outside Zooomr, but it doesn't give away any information about what my OpenID might be. This is odd because one of the advantages of OpenID is supposed to be that you can publish your OpenID address like your username, and your friends could grant you access to resources ahead of time, assuming that you'll be authenticating against the OpenID server you've specified.

Yeah, I know, it sounds outrageously complicated.

If I've used my own domain as an OpenID server (that would be really stupid to do here, though) then it should be reasonably simple to use delegation to point OpenID clients to another place to authenticate me. The trick is that I've yet to find any instructions that explain which URLs to use for this purpose. It requires two for some reason. Shouldn't I just be able to say, "Go look over at http://{OpenIDserver}.com instead of here"? Apparently not.

And I still don't know if that's going to work, because I don't know what URL I have on file at Zooomr. I don't even seem to be able to get Zooomr to send me an email with my OpenID info, because, well, I used OpenID for authentication, which doesn't require email.

This is perhaps just a support issue with Zooomr itself, but I think this problem will become more prevalent throughout sites that use OpenID for authenticaton.

For example, now, instead of having to remember simply a username and password, you must also remember the URL of your OpenID server. That might not be so bad, but because there are a handful of services offering OpenID logins, and they all add different features as they progress, you might try a few different services for login. And then, when you get really into OpenID, you might install an OpenID server module of your own on your own site, or maybe you'll figure out the delegate stuff. Either way, there's the potential for a lot of mixing and matching.

What would be ideal is if the OpenID servers could talk to each other and accept other OpenID server authentication as valid. It's not something that they should do automatically, of course, but it would be cool if you could accidentally provide the wrong OpenID domain, and then when you end up on OpenID Service A's authentication page, it would ask, "You have not previously allowed access to this site via this OpenID account. Do you want to search your other OpenID services for authentication?" That would be slick.

Anyway, I think this idea is important as we progress toward Identity 2.0, and I know that Habari will soon be part of the mix as we soon add OpenID client and service as default login options. Maybe Habari could spearhead this interconnectivity feature. I think it would be very useful.

Of course, if there is already technology in place for OpenID that employs this, I'm anxious to learn about it. Leave me a note, please. (Especially if you know how I can recover my Zooomr acocunt, since I'd really like to use it again.)