Joseph Smarr

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The 7-Eleven in Mountain View (near the old Plaxo office) has been transformed into a Kwik-E-Mart in support up the upcoming Simpsons movie. There are lot of hardcore Simpsons fans at Plaxo (myself included), so we had to check this out for ourselves. When we got there, there was a line out the door. So [...]

It’s hard to believe, but Michelle and I have now been happily married for two years! To celebrate, I took her on a little getaway in SF. We had an amazing dinner at Michael Mina and we stayed in a tower suite at the Westin St. Francis that looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge [...]

The PodTech crew shot and edited a really nice video at our recent Lunch 2.0 at Netgear. It covers the event and features an interview with the lunch 2.0 founders, including your humble narrator, on the origins of Lunch 2.0. I conducted the entire interview while lying on a bed in Netgear’s “lifestyle room” showcase, [...]

Yep, that’s right: the story of Lunch 2.0 is featured today on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle in a great article written by Jessica Guynn! Jessica spent a lot of time talking with us and visiting the recent Lunch 2.0 at LinkedIn, and she even read Terry’s and my recent tomes on the [...]

I’ll be attending the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2007a, to be precise) this Mon-Wed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I went to IIW2006b last year and was immediately excited to be a part of this community. The people involved are not only very smart, they’re pragmatic, hands-on, accessible, and motivated by all [...]