“A lot of WordPress’ biggest publisher and media sites have been seeking social login and user management some time,” Janrain director Jeff Mills told me yesterday. “Our hosted user registration and management platform offers over 30 different identity providers.”

Social login, of course, is the ability to log into a site or app with your Facebook, Google, or other social identity.

Those big publishers include traditional media agencies such as CNN and the New York Times, as well as many of the top technology blogs. TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat, for example, all run on WordPress VIP and will have access to the new technology.

“Any customers can now with a single click add Janrain to their websites,” Automattic’s Paul Maiorana says. “Our goal is to make it really easy for our customers to engage with third party platforms.”

Janrain provides social login and user management technologies that allow web publishers to quickly and easy sign up users, understand who they are, identify unique people with multiple profiles, and manage all the data collected from users to create better engagement. With the new capability turned on, a site’s registration and login system will be taken over by Janrain’s functionality.

Source: Janrain

Social login via Janrain in action

That’s important for Automattic’s big customers, as many of them have multiple sites and multiple databases of users. Janrain offers the ability to rationalize those multiple stores, and, if companies wish, create a single unified database of all their users from all their properties. Janrain already does this for numerous brands including the Universal Music Group, which runs hundreds of websites for artists such as Lady Gaga: Sign in on any one of them, and you’ll be signed in on all of them.

Janrain simultaneously announced a partnership with Disqus, the commenting and conversation capability on multiple sites, including VentureBeat. That’s important, because sites often use multiple plugins like Disqus, and they can now can take advantage of Janrain’s support for Backplane. Backplane essentially allows for on-page communication between multiple web apps on a website, so that users do not need to log in twice to multiple apps on the same page. Log in to the website, and you’re automatically logged into all functionality on the site, even if it’s from a separate provider.

Regular bloggers on WordPress.com, who reach almost 400 million people and drive 3.8 billion pageviewss each month, will not have access to this new capability, Maiorana said.

“We have no immediate plans to bring this to all Worpress.com sites,” he told me. “But the technology foundation is in place if we ever wanted to do that.”

In addition, there is a Janrain plugin that offers similar functionality for free or non-VIP WordPress.com blogs, Maiorana said.

photo credit: ocean.flynn via photopin cc

Unfortunately, WordPress.com had a little issue today — which means that VIP did too — taking down VentureBeat.com, along with more than a few other tech blogs. That’s the second time in four days WordPress.com has had performance issues.

We use WordPress VIP, as do other sites like TechCrunch and GigaOm, to combine the simplicity of WordPress — one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world — with cloud hosting, and powerful customization capabilities. So do mainstream organizations like MSNBC, Piers Morgan’s site, and the official Green Bay Packers blog, all of which adds up to billions of web pages served each month.

Unfortunately, no technology is perfect … not even the cloud.

WordPress PR issued a short statement about the outage:

WordPress.com had a site-wide outage that lasted less than 5 minutes. This outage was related to a small code issue and all sites are up and available now.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, was slightly more informative — and just a little contradictory, if you check the times — on the service’s status page:

At 1:20PM Pacific there was a site-wide outage/service degradation on WordPress.com.  The root cause was idenfitifed to be some debugging code which was trying to connect to servers which had been decommissioned.  Once the issue was identified, it was quickly resolved and service returned to normal about 1:27PM.  We are in the process of auditing our codebase to ensure the same problem will not happen in the future.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

One note to keep in mind if you are running services on WordPress.com, however: the status page says that there are still some performance issues, so you may see some slowness or other problems as Automattic cleans everything up.

Image credit: WordPress VIP