Joseph Smarr

I recently helped Dave Winer debug his OAuth Consumer code, and the process was more painful than it should have been. (He was trying to write a Twitter app using their beta OAuth support, and since he has his own scripting environment for his OPML editor, there wasn’t an existing library he could just drop [...]

The quest to open up the Social Web is quickly shifting from a vision of the future to a vision of the present. Last week we reached an important milestone in delivering concrete benefits to mainstream users from the Open Stack. Together with Google, we released a new way to join Plaxo–without having to create [...]

I’m excited and humbled by the amazing progress we’ve made this year on Portable Contacts, which started out as little more than a few conversations and an aspirational PowerPoint deck this summer. We’ve now got a great community engaged around solving this problem (from companies large and small as well as from the grass-roots), we [...]

A New Open Stack: Greater than the Sum of its Parts Internet Identity Workshop 2008b Mountain View, CA November 10, 2008 A New Open Stack: Greater Than the Sum of its Parts Download PPT (5.5MB) I was asked to give one of the opening overview talks at the Internet Identity Workshop about how the “Open [...]

The Widgets Shall Inherit the Web Widget Summit 2008 San Francisco, CA November 4, 2008 Download PPT (7.1MB) For the second year in a row, I gave a talk at Niall Kennedy‘s Widget Summit in San Francisco. My my, what a difference a year makes! Last year, I was still talking about high-performance JavaScript, and [...]

As a longtime avid Netflix fan, I was excited to see that they finally released an official API today. As an avid fan of the Open Web, I was even more excited to see that this API gives users full access to their ratings, reviews, and queue, and it does so using a familiar REST [...]

Performance Challenges for the Open Web Stanford CS193H: High Performance Web Sites Stanford, CA September 29, 2008 Download PPT (6.8 MB) Web site performance guru Steve Souders is teaching a class at Stanford this fall on High Performance Web Sites (CS193H). He invited me to give a guest lecture to his class on the new [...]

Web 2.0/Web 3.0 Mashup Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT (EmTech08) Boston, MA September 24, 2008 I was invited to speak on a panel at EmTech, the annual conference on emerging technologies put on by MIT’s TechnologyReview Magazine, on the future of the web. The conference spans many disciplines (alternative energy, cloud computing, biotech, mobile, etc.) [...]

Tying it All Together: Implementing the Open Web Web 2.0 Expo New York New York, NY September 19, 2008 Download PPT (7.2 MB) I gave the latest rev of my talk on how the social web is opening up and how the various building blocks (OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, PortableContacts, XRDS-Simple, Microformats, etc.) fit together to [...]

OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth! Oh, My! Google I/O San Francisco, CA May 29, 2008 Download PPT (7.3 MB) Update: Google has posted a full-length video of my talk, along with a web-friendly copy of my slides. I was one of only a few non-Google employees who was invited to give a talk at Google’s big [...]