Joseph Smarr

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 [...]

Three of Plaxo’s best engineers and designers left almost a year ago to start a new company (much as they’d done a few years ago with HipCal, which Plaxo acquired in 2006). After a brief private beta, today they are launching to the public. Meet HipChat. It’s a new (and, IMO, very clever and promising) [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]