Social data sharing will change lives and business
DEMO 09
Palm Desert, CA
March 3, 2009
Watch full video (via Brightcove)
I flew down to an oddly-lush oasis in the middle of the desert last week to attend a panel at DEMO about the future of the social web. Max Engel from MySpace has a nice write-up of the event, and a full video of our panel is available on Brightcove. Eric Eldon of VentureBeat moderated the panel, which featured me, Max Engel, Dave Morin from Facebook, and Kevin Marks from Google. In addition to a lively discussion, we each demoed our “latest and greatest” efforts at opening up the social web. Max showed the first public demo of MySpace’s support for hybrid OpenID+OAuth login using a friendly popup, Kevin showed off how to add FriendConnect to any blog, and Dave showed off some new examples of Facebook Connect in the wild. I showed our new Google-optimized onboarding experiment with Plaxo, and revealed that it’s working so well that we’re now using it for 100% of new users invited to Plaxo via a gmail.com email address.
It’s just amazing and inspiring to me that these major mainstream internet sites are all now able to stand up and demo slick, user-friendly cross-site interoperability and data sharing using open APIs, and we’re all continuing to converge on common standards so developers don’t have to write separate code to interoperate with each site. You can really measure the speed of progress in this space by watching the quantity and quality of these Open Web demos continue to increase, and with SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, Google I/O, and Internet Identity Workshop all still to come in the first half of 2009, I have a feeling that we all ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! 🙂