The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide
Google I/O 2009
San Francisco, CA
May 28, 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 my talk last year laid out the promise and vision of an interoperable social web ecosystem, this year I wanted to show all the concrete progress we’ve made as an industry in achieving that goal. So my talk was full of demos–signing up for Plaxo with an existing Gmail account in just two clicks, using MySpaceID to jump into a niche music site without a separate sign-up step, ending “re-friend madness” by honoring Facebook friend connections on Plaxo (via Facebook Connect), killing the “password anti-pattern” with user-friendly contact importers from a variety of large sites (demonstrated with FriendFeed), and sharing activity across sites using Google FriendConnect and Plaxo. Doing live demos is always a risky proposition, especially when they involve cross-site interop, but happily all the demos worked fine and the talk was a big success!

I began my talk by observing that the events of the last year has made it clear: The web is going social, and the social web is going open. By the end of my talk, having showed so many mainstream sites with deep user-friendly and user-friendly interoperability, I decided to go a step further and declare: The web is now social, and the social web is now open. You don’t have to wait any longer to start reaping the benefits. It’s time to dive in.

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