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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Future of Social Networks Future of Web Apps Miami (with Tantek Çelik and Brian Oberkirch) Miami, FL February 29, 2008 View Slides (slideshare) Download MP3 Audio (37.3 MB) In addition to the half-day workshop I presented at FOWA Miami, I also gave a talk as part of the main event with Tantek and Brian Orberkirch (who also has [...]

Implementing Open Social Web support on your site Future of Web Apps Miami (workshop) Miami, FL February 28, 2008 Download PPT (3.8 MB) I was invited to give a workshop and be on a panel at the Future of Web Apps in Miami. I attended the first FOWA in SF in 2006, and I really enjoyed [...]