Joseph Smarr

I spent the weekend in SF at OpenIDDevCamp, hosted at SixApart’s offices. In the style of BarCamp and iPhoneDevCamp, the idea was just to get a lot of people together who were interested in OpenID, provide the space and amenities for them to work together, and let them loose. About 30-40 people showed up, including […]

I guess I missed it with the Thanksgiving break, but Tim Berners-Lee recently wrote a thoughtful and compelling essay on the Social Graph, and how it fits in to the evolution of the net and the web so far. Definitely worth a read!
I was pleasantly surprised to see that he references the Bill of Rights […]

My good friend Chris’s wife Annamarie MacLeod is an actor, and she’s starring in a new play called No Such Thing that opens tonight in San Francisco. Michelle and I went to see the final dress rehearsal last night, and we were both very impressed.

The play is essentially a haunting, impressionistic sketch of a man […]

When I gave my talk on High-Performance JavaScript at OSCON in July, I found out that I was speaking right before “Chief Performance Yahoo!” Steve Souders. To be honest, I was a bit nervous–we read everything Steve writes at Plaxo, and he runs a whole group at Yahoo that does nothing but focus on web […]

Alpha blogger and avant-garde digital media journalist Robert Scoble came over to Plaxo yesterday to talk with me and John McCrea about the Online Identity Consolidator I wrote that Plaxo launched today and open-sourced. He posted a 30-minute video of the interview with his analysis on Scobleizer, and I’ve included the video below as well.
Scoble’s […]

I like twitter, and I use it a lot (I even a twitter widget on my web site). A lot of my friends use it too, some more regularly than others. I use Bloglines to keep up with the stream of status updates from my twitter friends so I can check in periodically and pick […]

I love living here in Silicon Valley. I’m surrounded by smart, passionate people who don’t feel they need permission to make a difference.
Case in point was BarCampBlock this weekend–a spontaneous un-conference-style gathering of 900+ hackers and other valleyites sprawled across the streets of Palo Alto, as well as inside the offices of several host startups. […]

As a longtime Smashing Pumpkins fan, I was thrilled to get to see them play live again last night at The Fillmore. If you’ve never seen a show there, the Fillmore is a tiny, intimate venue in SF–I was about 6 feet from the stage in the center, and the view and sound were amazing. […]

Yesterday morning, I watched David Recordon lead an “OpenID Bootcamp” for OSCON attendees (including a handout for everyone of the implementation guide I wrote, wow!). Then last night he received a Google - O’Reilly Open Source Award for his contributions to the development and spread of OpenID. What a day!
David has been a great friend […]

I just posted some thoughts on my new role at Plaxo as their Chief Platform Architect. Like my previous roles at Plaxo, this is both a formalization of something I was already doing and a decision to focus more intensely on it. In this case, it’s because Plaxo has ended up in a potentially pivotal […]