Joseph Smarr

[Usual disclaimer: I currently work for Google on Google+ (which I think is awesome), but as always the thoughts on this blog are purely my personal opinion as a lifelong technology lover and builder.] At the core of innovation in social networking is the competition to be a user’s tool of choice when they have [...]

Fighting for the Future of the Social Web: Selling Out and Opening Up O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2011 Portland, OR July 27, 2011 (Note: some of the footer fonts are messed up on slideshare, sorry.) Download PPT (12.5 MB) A year and a half after joining Google, and a year after my last talk [...]

Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websitesGoogle I/O 2010San Francisco, CAMay 19, 2010 View talk and download slides as PDF My third year speaking at Google I/O, and my first as a Googler! I teamed up with fellow Googler John Panzer, and together we demonstrated how far open standards have come in allowing [...]

One of the last things I did before leaving Plaxo was to implement PubSubHubbub (PuSH) subscriber support, so that any blogs which ping a PuSH hub will show up almost instantly in pulse after being published. It’s easy to do (you don’t even need a library!), and it significantly improves the user experience while simultaneously [...]

High on my to-do list for 2010 will be to update my contact info in Plaxo, because I’ll be starting a new job in late January. After nearly 8 amazing years at Plaxo, I’m joining Google to help drive a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web. I’m incredibly excited about this [...]

What an RP Wants, Part 2 OpenID Summit 2009 (Hosted by Yahoo!) Mountain View, CA November 2, 2009 What an RP Wants, Part 2 Download PPT (2.1 MB) I was invited to give a talk at the OpenID Summit as a follow-up to my talk “What an RP Wants“, which I gave in February at [...]

The kind Google I/O folks have now posted a full video of my recent talk, “The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide“. They did a great job editing back and forth between me and my slides. If you weren’t able to make it to Google I/O (or you thought the talk was so good you want [...]

The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide Google I/O 2009 San Francisco, CA May 28, 2009 The Social Web: An Implementer's Guide (Google I/O 2009) Download PPT (7.3 MB) Google invited me back for a second year in a row to speak at their developer conference about the state-of-the-art of opening up the social web. While [...]

Portable Contacts and vCardDAV IETF 74 San Francisco, CA March 25, 2009 Download PPT (81 KB) or PDF You may remember the venerable IETF standards-body from such foundational internet RFCs as HTTP (aka the web), SMTP (aka e-mail), and vCard (aka contact info). So I’ll be honest that I was a bit intimidated when they [...]

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 [...]