Thoughts on web development, tech, and life.

Category: Papers and Talks (Page 1 of 5)

A collection of academic and professional papers, presentations, and talks that I have given.

AI and the future of jobs

I was invited to give this year’s keynote address to the German International School of Silicon Valley, where both of my kids attend. The high school students have started taking internships and thinking about jobs, so the school wanted me to share some thoughts on how AI may change the future landscape for work and how the students should think about preparing. This is something I have a lot of thoughts about, although (as you’ll hear) I’m the first to admit that no one has a clue how the future will play out, especially these days.

Nevertheless, I was excited to pull together a number of strands from my own career and related topics I’ve read and thought a lot about like wealth inequality and even music, and deliver it in what I think turned out to be a pretty engaging and broadly consumable format. I was pleasantly surprised how many students (and also their parents) came up to me later (even days later) to say how inspiring and thought provoking they found it, so I thought others might like to hear it to.

My wife recorded the talk on her phone from the back of the room, so the quality isn’t the best, but I’ve extracted the audio, cleaned it up a bit with Audacity, and made a (lightly edited) transcript using Descript. I’ve included both below. Let me know if you have any feedback or if you see things differently! When I polled the students at the beginning of the talk, they were generally more worried than excited about how AI will impact their future job prospects. I hope my talk injected some cause for optimism. 🙂

Transcript

[00:00] Now that you’re in high school, it’s natural to start asking “what’s the world going to want from you all?” as you get out of school the next five years, or what’s it going to want for you in the next 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, there’s a lot of future to be had. Right now is when you’re making choices about how to prepare yourself for that. Trying to figure out what’s the optimal thing to learn and do. Honestly, and I say this as a parent, it is really hard to figure out right now. I think that you’re entering one of the most uncertain times in our future that I can certainly think of an analogy for, for a number of reasons that we’ll talk about.

So the short answer to my talk is I don’t really have a clue what to tell you to do. And anybody who thinks that they do and gives you a confident answer about what to study or how to learn or what’s going to happen, what jobs robots are gonna take or not is full of shit (excuse me). But it’s important to know that we’re entering an era of pretty big uncertainty.

I do think, however, there’s a lot that we can think deeply about that will help you, I hope, ground your own decisions [01:00] about what you want to spend your time doing. And so that’s what I thought we could talk about today. And there’s a number of sources of uncertainty, but obviously AI I think is one of the biggest ones that’s the elephant in the room because it is the thing that could be displacing a lot of traditional knowledge work.

So I’m curious first, just to make sure I know what your own experience is, raise your hand if in the last month or so (i.e. recently enough) you’ve used one of these frontier large language models like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, or one of these things. Looks like not everyone, but almost everyone.

That’s good. How many of you are using a paid version that either you or your parents are paying for that’s higher power than even the normal free version? Not many. I mention it because there is a difference, and I think one of the best ways you can start to think about how to change your own approach to things with AI is to just use the latest and greatest stuff. So tell your parents, from me, I think it’s a wise investment.

How many of you that raised your hands have done more than just played with [02:00] it, but have actually say made something or built something or learned something that you’re genuinely proud of and that you probably wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t used AI? A few of you. I certainly feel that way. I think you have to taste it to realize what’s behind it.

Okay, last question we’ll do, this as an A/B test, but there’s no wrong answer. How many of you, when you think about your own future, think that the presence of AI in the future of technology generally makes you more excited than worried? And how many of you are more worried than excited? Excited first. Yeah, very few. How many more worried than excited? Oh, okay, the majority. Interesting. Interesting. Okay, maybe I’ll be able to change your mind a little bit, because I’m fundamentally an optimist about this stuff.

Just a very quick bit about me, so you know where I’m coming from. So, as you can hear, I’m American born and raised in America. My connection to the German school comes from the fact that I had the good sense to marry a nice Austrian girl 20 years ago. And, [03:00] so I have kids here in sixth grade and ninth grade. So that’s why this is a personal topic for me as well as a topic of professional interest. I came out to California in the late nineties to study AI at Stanford, because actually even 30 years ago, it was clear to me then, and, obviously not to as many people as it is now, but that AI was going to completely change the world and usher in a sort of second industrial revolution and have a really profound effect on society, and I really wanted to be a part of that.

So this is something that I’ve been working on and thinking about ever since. I did academic research for a while. I’ve been in a number of startups. I was at Google for over a decade, including working on Google Assistant, which was the predecessor to Gemini. So it’s something I’ve done a fair amount with personally. But I also have thought a lot and read a lot about the sort of economic and societal implications of technology change in AI in particular, because I’m very concerned about [04:00] wealth inequality and making sure that we can not only create the future, but all share in it. So that’s where I’m coming from on this, and that’s what I’ll talk about today.

So why do I say that we’re in such an unpredictable time? From my vantage point, and I’m curious if you agree with this or not, I think we could be on the brink of a kind of technological utopia in your lifetime. That is the stuff of only science fiction until fairly recently. If you think about it, we could have abundant clean energy and self-driving cars and flying cars and limitless intelligence helping us to solve long unsolved problems in science and climate change and curing diseases and brain computer interfaces and exploring space and all that. These are all things that have just seemed completely out of reach for pretty much all of humanity, right? But you can just go around here within a 10 mile radius and see people working on all of these things with really credible paths to making, [05:00] continued progress, right?

So I think if we can stick around and if you can be part of ushering that in, it could be an absolutely wonderful thing there. Humans were subsistence hunter gatherers and farmers for almost all of human existence, right? And it’s really only since technology started accelerating that we’ve seen this sort of massive ability to bring everybody’s standard of living up and there’s no reason why we can’t go significantly further and we better hope we can.

Because we still have a lot of problems in the world. Despite all that optimism, we also, I don’t know about you, but if you read the news recently, it’s hard not to escape the fact that we might be on the brink of civil war and pandemics that we’re totally unprepared for, and runaway climate change and cyber attacks, or AI running amok or mad men running around with nuclear weapons. It’s pretty bleak out there, right? Let’s be honest. And that’s happening at the same time, right?

I think the more you study history, the more you come to appreciate the fact that the future is not foreordained. There’s a lot of fairly random things that can cause it to go down [06:00] very different paths. You are all going to have to navigate these, sort of real high highs and real low lows that we’re both staring at. A lot of possibilities. And on top of that, I think even if we are able to create a lot of technological abundance, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be shared widely enough to maintain social cohesion. It could very well be that it continues the path that we’re on right now of concentrating wealth and power in a few hands and everybody else not sure how to participate. That’s something that you’ll have to deal with as well. We’ll talk a little bit about that

The last thing I would say is that it really was true, maybe not for your parents, but certainly for your grandparents, maybe even your parents, that you could think “I’m going to school for 10 or 20 years, I’m going to learn some skills, and then I’m gonna practice those skills for the next 40 or 50 years, maybe even at the same company the entire time, and that’s sort of it”. I just think those days are over for sure. I think the rate of change is accelerating itself so quickly [07:00] that you’re going to have to be lifelong learners. You’re going to have to change your identity, you’re going to have to do multiple things. You may live a lot longer, if we cure a lot of diseases. But you may also just have to reinvent yourself and think of school as more of a launching pad for more fundamental meta-skills like learning and curiosity and so forth. So I just think that makes it that much harder to predict, because it’s not just “oh, I’m gonna learn X and that’s gonna gimme a good job”. What the AI can do, and what you can do is going to change and the set of possibilities are going to change.

So anyway, that’s the backdrop I would think about. Hopefully I haven’t depressed you too much! I do think there’s good news. What I try to do when I think about my own kids’ future, when I think about the world more generally, is try to think more deeply about what is the way that you can add value to the world that is fairly universal? What is it that causes a job to be valuable in the first place in a more fundamental way? And also what are human universals that are unlikely to change even in the world of rapid [08:00] technological change? So that’s what I wanted to talk through with you, because that’s how I at least maintain some grounding and some optimism despite all this uncertainty.

So I don’t know if you’ve thought much about it, like why do some people get paid more than others when they’re both working hard and the same number of hours? It’s a huge range, living in Silicon Valley, there are people working super hard, making no money and there are people working super hard making unfathomable amounts of money and everything in between. Anybody have any ideas about what sort of fundamentally drives that? You can shout out if you want.

Economists will differ on this. I’m not sure there’s a well defined agreement on this. But the way I think about it, for what it’s worth, is I think there’s sort of two factors that are interrelated. One is how much supply versus how much demand exists for the skills and knowledge that you have and the connections you have and all in what you can offer. The other is how much [09:00] leverage do you get in the world based on the application of that effort.

So as an example, if you’re a Uber driver or you work on building construction or there’s lots of jobs like that where it can be hard work and you can spend a lot of hours doing it and you still don’t make a lot of money. The reason is lots of other people could also do that job without a ton of training. And you’re only driving one car at a time or fixing one house at a time or whatever. Even traditionally high paying jobs like doctors and lawyers and that sort of thing, they top out because you’re very well trained, so there are not that many people who can do what you can do, but you’re only fixing one person at a time or writing one contract at a time. Whereas the sort of amount of unbelievable wealth that’s been generated by Silicon Valley, or Hollywood for that matter, comes from the fact that not only do you have a lot of very specialized knowledge and a lot of very specialized connections and work and experience and so forth, but you’re changing, you all have cell phones in your pockets and you’re all watching Netflix and all these things, right? The amount of impact you can have from the leverage of your impact.

[10:00] It always made me a little humble at Google. I would write some code and push a change and it was like, “okay, a hundred million people are gonna wake up tomorrow and see that”, it was like, “I’d better not fuck it up”. It’s huge leverage. So I would just say in general, there are lots of different problems in the world that need solving that you can go out and decide you wanna get excited about, but I would ask you to keep in mind: where can I build up a set of, like I said, not just, book smarts, but like skills, practical, real world experience, people, like the whole set of what it is you amass? Where can you get on the right side of that supply and demand curve, and how can you find ever more leverage to use from that? Can you, instead of fixing something in one place, can you build a system? Can you teach other people to do it? It doesn’t have to just be traditional technology, but other ways to find leverage.

The problem of course, is when you’re trying to think through supply and demand, what AI is going to fundamentally do is add a lot more supply of a lot of different skills that previously didn’t exist, right? So like in my own [11:00] field of software engineering, AI is getting really good at writing code. So does that mean it’s no longer going to be valuable to write code because the supply and demand is going to get totally messed up? You can ask that question both in terms of what’s in demand and also where is the AI going to provide the supply. Of course, it’s hard to predict because the history of AI, which dates back now well over 50 years, is constantly a history of people saying: no computer can ever play chess or translate human languages or talk in a natural voice or compose new music or, like all these things people have said very confidently. And of course computers have steamrolled over all of those expectations. And they’re showing no signs of slowing.

Even in the real world, robotics are still lagging behind AI just in a digital format, but I think there’s a lot of progress going on right now with robotics and actually embodied cognition is one of the things that really unlocks, like having a good brain from AI makes a lot of robotics tasks possible in the real world that [12:00] work. I think the most salient example, maybe you don’t think about it this way, but if you’ve seen Waymo’s driving around in the streets here, those are robots, right? They’re machines that are using perception to navigate the real world and not bump into things and decide where they want to go. They’re robots. They just have wheels instead of legs. But it really does work and it really is a total game changer. And it is potentially displacing a huge amount of human labor, right? Actually, driving a car is one of the top professions in most places, right? And, totally unclear if that will still be a thing 10, 20 years from now.

So you have to be careful about what AI can and can’t do. But if I look at what I’ve gone through as a software engineer, just give you some personal experience, which is, on the one hand, it is really amazing how much good code AI can write and how much more it knows about esoteric aspects of different things that I don’t know about. But it’s also been amazing for me to see, as someone who uses it every day now for years, how much value I still have to provide on top of that. I don’t say that to brag. It really is just [13:00] fascinating to me that I wouldn’t have been able to tease apart the parts of my job that are replaceable by AI from the parts that aren’t. But there’s actually a ton of both.

For example, if you tell the AI: write a program that does X, Y, and Z, it might do a decent job of that, but it is not keeping up with what’s going on in the industry and what was just happening in the meetings and what’s the overall roadmap of the team and what’s our unique advantage and, oh, this thing you used, we were planning to tear that down next year anyway, so please don’t use it. There’s so much additional context that you as people bring to the puzzle. There’s also, for lack of a better word, the wisdom I’ve accrued as a multi-decade software engineer, which is there’s lots of ways to build things that are technically correct today but are unlikely to be as good in the future. They’re too brittle or they make too many of the wrong assumptions, or they’re making things unnecessarily complicated. One of the things you learn in any profession as you get older is those areas where you’ve done it a bunch of times and you know the sort of attractive pitfalls, right? [14:00] If you ever work with more junior people, that’s really the difference: they can be really smart, but they make a lot of “rookie mistakes” because they just haven’t been in it enough to really understand those second and third order effects. And you really see that too.

Maybe the coding systems will continue to get better at that, but unless they’re going to be sitting in all the meetings and chiming in on the slack threads and going to industry events and reading the news and so on? You could imagine a world in which my AI text editor is doing that, but it’s a pretty far stretch from the way things are today. Then putting even on top of that: I have to still wake up every day and decide I want to work on this and what I want to work on, and I have to motivate the team around me to get excited to work on stuff, and I have to get people outside to be excited about it or to get people to want to give me money to build my thing. All of that human stuff: building trust and getting people excited or having people feel like they need to work harder because they don’t want disappoint me, and vice versa, right? All that stuff is very human and it’s just not the same when [15:00] there’s blinking cursor on the screen, right?

So even as much of a optimist as I am about the continued progress of AI. I’m very aware of all the stuff that it’s not really on a path to do anytime soon. And that’s where I would suggest you anchor your own thoughts about how can I take an area. So in medicine, if you’re just being trained to read a radiology image or something like that, that narrow task might be very well doable by AI. But if you think about what it takes to be an effective doctor, let alone a medical researcher, let alone someone who helps change health policy in the country, etc., there’s so many layers above that that really need that human touch and I think will for a long time.

Now, like I said, I think you want to figure out how to be part of creating a lot of value, not just because you wanna make a lot of money, but also because you want to use your precious time as effectively as possible, right? I still think there is this big question, and I’ll be honest, I don’t know how we’re gonna fix it, but I encourage you to think about not just what can I do to [16:00] create a lot of value, but also how can I be part of shaping our future so that value gets shared broadly enough that the whole system is sustainable? Because, I think the history is pretty clear here that when wealth and power get too concentrated. a the economy slows down because there’s just not enough money circulating, there’s not enough people able to buy stuff. We already see today there’s a huge affordability crisis that most people have. Then at some point, political, societal stability breaks down too. And ultimately you get the French Revolution or things like that, right? And so we could absolutely be down that path where you’ve got a few trillionaires in their bunkers and we’re all using their stuff and we’re serfs to the AIs and we don’t want that world. They have solar panel arrays everywhere and so forth.

So it’s just interesting for you all to think about. It doesn’t mean you have to go into politics necessarily, but I do think that positive sum thinking is the secret to Silicon Valley. It’s basically “we can grow the pie”; you don’t have to lose for me to win. We can just make things work better. We can find new ways to distribute value. But I really encourage you to think about [17:00] that as well. what, any field you go into, what’s, where’s that opportunity to create that kind of positive sum game?

Alright, let me just wrap up here. I don’t wanna talk too long. The last thing I would encourage you to think about when you’re trying to figure out what you can do uniquely in the world is think more about what makes humans special. I talk a lot about this with my kids, but you really have to remember that as advanced as we are, we are monkeys, we’re social primates, right? That is not going to change any time soon. We are hardwired for social, understanding what each other thinks, building status in groups. That is a lot of what humans want and a lot of what drives us. And that is something that we really don’t want from machines. I think you can probably see that around you already.

I see a lot of Fußball Trikots here and there’s a lot of passion around that. There are robots that are pretty good at playing soccer already, but I just don’t think anybody is going to [18:00] be as passionate about a robot soccer player or a robot soccer team anytime soon as they are about the actual players that they care about. Why is that? It’s not because robots can’t be good at playing soccer. It’s because you don’t just care about the execution of soccer; you care about the human drama. Watching a player go from a rookie up or the team that you’ve stayed with through the highs and the lows or all the fans that are around you. It’s actually the human aspect.

This really hit home for me when, last summer we were lucky enough to be in Munich, when Taylor Swift played there in the Olympiastadion, and I don’t know how many of you have been to that place, there’s this whole Olympia Park around it and it was just completely full, probably 50,000 thousand people all dressed up with bracelets and singing songs and posters and shirts. Half them didn’t even have tickets for the show. They were just hanging out. And it was such an amazing energy and I was just thinking it’s so cool that people do this, but would anybody do this for an [19:00] AI-composed piece of music, no matter how good it is? Even if it was super catchy? No, of course not. It’s not just that it is Taylor up on stage, it’s the whole ethos of the culture that is around that and that’s what we care about, right? None of that is going to change even though AI will get better at writing music and maybe even really good music, but there’s still, people want to still see a human, right?

I don’t about you, but like I love live music, and I always think it’s funny, you can go see somebody play live even in like a coffee shop or whatever, not a big stage, and it’s still way more enjoyable than listening to recorded music through the speakers, even if the person who recorded that music is more talented than the person who’s playing it. It’s weird, right? Because if the goal was just, I want the best music possible to enter my eardrums, like the sort of very narrow idea of the work, then you wouldn’t ever have the need for live musicians, right? Because we already recorded it once and we can spread it everywhere. And yet I think if anything, the opposite is happening, which is we really enjoy that [20:00] live communal experience. We really enjoy seeing the person play. I love playing music myself too. Even though I’m not very good, it’s incredibly fulfilling.

So I think that’s the human universal stuff that I think is not going to change. And that’s to say nothing of, if you’re actually caring physically or emotionally for a loved one, a, child, a parent. Again, I think robots will have a huge impact on healthcare, but I think there’s nothing that’s going to replace the human touch; the feeling that a teacher really believed in you and made you feel like you wanted to be more because they inspired you or that sort of stuff. Again, we’re monkeys. So embrace your inner, monkey! Don’t, don’t run away from it.

The last thing I would say about that is that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the psychology literature on human drive? You can read Daniel Pink or one of these people, but basically the thing that motivates humans is a combination of desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Have any of you heard that framework before? So autonomy is you want to be able to [21:00] be your own boss or march to the beat of your own drum; mastery is you want to feel like you’re getting really good at something; and purpose is you want to feel like the work you’re doing actually matters to someone. Pretty much everything humans do is trying to get one of those things. Actually, making a lot of money is not one of them. You have to make enough money that it’s not a problem, but after that, more money isn’t nearly as motivating as these other factors.

You see that in Silicon Valley, right? You see a lot of people who have more money than they ever spend, but are working really, hard. Why is that? Why aren’t you just on a beach? But laying on a beach doesn’t give you a lot of mastery and purpose, right? Whereas getting back into building something new, or even back to the street musician example, why do people become starving artists and make no money, but play music or make art or whatever? It’s because it really does fulfill a lot of those drives, and they’re willing to do it despite the fact that it doesn’t really pay well. So if, you strive for something that actually lights your candle, gets you excited, makes you want to go push and do things to make some change in the world you want to see, I think you can start to optimize for that.

And, maybe one of the good sides [22:00] is maybe it’ll even become less important that it creates a lot of economic value. Because if we are successful at creating overall abundance and sharing it widely, then it probably won’t matter as much that what you’re doing personally is creating a lot of value. A lot of people who make a lot of money really hate their jobs, right? They really don’t love it, in fact, a lot of them have a “side hustle”, or they’re like a 12th level Orc on World Warcraft or whatever, because that’s the thing that actually fulfills them, not the work. So, as much as possible, try to find work you can do that you can throw yourself into for a long time. It’s just such a hedge against what will and won’t be the “hot job” at the time. Does that make sense?

To sum it up, if you take away one thing from this, it’s that I think you should all know that the future is very uncertain, but that there’s a lot of promise and if you can just try to, maybe it sounds cliche, but cultivate a sense of agency, have a growth mindset, remember [23:00] that there’s lots of things in the world that should and could be different, and if you can just be curious about them and then have the courage to learn things and try things and fail and iterate and just get out there and try to make a difference. That set of skills will always be valuable no matter what the set of “building blocks” that are out there are. Remember, everybody else is going to have to same building blocks as you. The reason why having ChatGPT do your homework is not a good idea is not just because this is the way school is set up. It’s because everybody else can press that same “yes” button that you could have, right? So you’re not differentiating yourself in any way if you’re just the like passive conduit. What you want to do is figure out how to use that technology to do something you couldn’t do before, or to do something better or faster, or to have or be more ambitious because you’re like, “I have no idea how to do this”, but I can learn it on YouTube and I can try it with this. That’s, to me, the positive way of thinking about it. That’s where you’re still providing that unique set of supply and demand skills.

So, be curious. Have a growth mindset. Care about other people, right? Don’t be a robot yourself. Humans care about [24:00] humans. The more you understand, not just technology (I do think it’s very important to stay up on the forefront of technology), but I also think it’s really important to understand what drives art and culture and fashion and empathy and all these things.

And schnall dich an, because it’s gonna be a wild ride, but I think it could potentially be a really great one. I hope that’s helpful. Thanks.

Leaders in Tech podcast appearance (part 2)

After my initial conversation on the Leaders in Tech podcast, the host asked me to come back and follow-up with more of my thoughts on AI and the future of work and what we humans will or won’t still want or need to do in the future. We discussed what we can learn from the study of the human brain, and in particular how the pattern-matching cerebral cortex is distinct from the goal-oriented “old brain”, the latter of which is still largely missing from the AI models we’re building. While a lot of knowledge work will undoubtedly be augmented if not replaced by AI over time, we reflected on how much of being an effective leader in tech (or in most professions) still comes down to innately human characteristics of passion, empathy, group coordination, and so on, as well as how we will continue to be driven by work that affords us autonomy, mastery, and purpose, even if it becomes disconnected from how we provide for our basic needs.

Throughout the interview, you will hear why I am still fundamentally optimistic about “team human” and our potential to thrive in a world of technological abundance, which AI can help us usher in (if we don’t mess things up in the meantime, of course!).

Machines Learning About People: What’s Next? (Future in Review 2015)

Interview with Ed Butler (photo by Kris Krüg)

I’m still buzzing with excitement and energy from attending my first Future in Review (FiRe) conference in October. I’ve been to my fair share of tech conferences, but rarely have I experienced such a dense concentration of brilliant and inspiring people from such a diverse set of fields (from cyber security to graphene, from China experts to environmental activists, and more) in such a relaxed and inviting atmosphere (we were all holed up in the Stein Erikson lodge in Deer Valley for the week, so nobody just gave their talk and took off). I see now why The Economist has called it “The best technology conference in the world.”

Another thing that makes FiRe special is how many of the participants are also speakers. True to form, conference organizer Mark Anderson threw me in the deep end with not one but three speaking slots: a 5-minute “view of the future” lightning talk, a 15-minute 1:1 interview with the BBC’s Ed Butler on “Machines Learning About People: What’s Next?”, and co-hosting a breakout session on AI and Robotics with Scout co-founder Brett Horvath. Unbeknownst to me, the first two sessions were recorded, and Mark has allowed me to share the MP3s of those talks here:

  • “Hot Spots: Five Views of the Future” (first 5 minutes are me talking about how ubiquitous sharing and context-aware gadgets will soon make us much smarter about the places we visit and people we meet)
  • “Machines Learning About People: What’s Next?” (Ed and I discuss why machine learning is increasingly used for personalization, why it’s both necessary and exciting, what the technical and privacy challenges are, and so on; featuring a surprise Q&A with Cory Doctorow at the end).

Demoing Google Stories (photo by Kris Krüg)

You can probably tell from my speed of talking in the first one that I was a bit nervous/excited to be speaking in front of such an august crowd. By the second talk (on the following day), I had calmed down a little (but this is still me we’re talking about). l hope they’ll invite me back next year, but either way, I’m even more optimistic for the future having seen firsthand how many super smart and driven people are out there tackling the full spectrum of challenges facing us!

Fighting for the Future of the Social Web: Selling Out and Opening Up (OSCON 2011)

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 on the Social Web, I returned to OSCON (one of my favorite conferences, which I’ve been speaking at for over half a decade now!) to reflect on the progress we’ve collectively made (and haven’t made) to open up the social web. I covered the latest developments in OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and related open web standards, mused about the challenges we’re still facing to adoption and ease-of-use and what to do about them, and considered what changes we should expect going forward now that many of the formerly independent open social web enthusiasts (myself included) now work for larger companies.

Not to spoil the punchline, but if you know me at all it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m still optimistic about the future! 😉

Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websites (Google I/O 2010)

Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websites
Google I/O 2010
San Francisco, CA
May 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 developers to build rich cross-site social integrations. From frictionless sign-up using OpenID, OAuth, and webfinger to finding your friends with Portable Contacts and microformats to sharing rich activities and holding real-time distributed conversations with ActivityStrea.ms, PubSubHubBub, and salmon, it really is remarkable how much progress we’ve made as a community. And it still feels like we’re just getting started, with the real payoff right around the corner!

We took a literal approach to our concept of “bridging the islands” by telling a story of two imaginary islanders, who meet while on vacation and fall in love. They struggle with all the same problems that users of today’s social web do–the pain of immigrating to a new place, the pain of being able to find your friends once they’ve moved, and the pain of being able to stay in touch with the people you care about, even when you don’t all live in the same place. Besides having fun stretching the metaphor and making pretty slides (special thanks to Chris Messina for his artistic inspiration and elbow grease!), the point is that these are all fundamental problems, and just as we created technology to solve them in the real world, so must be solve them on the Social Web.

Chris’s talk at I/O told this story at a high level and with additional color, while we dove more into the technology that makes it possible. Make sure to check out both talks, and I hope they will both inspire and inform you–whether as a developer or a user–to help us complete this important work as a community!



What an RP Wants, Part 2 (OpenID Summit 2009)

What an RP Wants, Part 2
OpenID Summit 2009 (Hosted by Yahoo!)
Mountain View, CA
November 2, 2009

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 OpenID Design Summit. In both cases, I shared my experiences from Plaxo’s perspective as a web site that is trying to succeed at letting users sign up using accounts they already have on Google, Yahoo, and other OpenID Provider sites. This talk reviewed the progress we’ve made as a community since February, and laid out the major remaining challenges to making it a truly-successful end-to-end experience to be an OpenID Relying Party (RP).

My basic message was this: we’ve made a lot of progress, but we’ve still got a lot left to do. So let’s re-double our efforts and commit ourselves once again to working together and solving these remaining problems. As much success as OpenID has had to date, its continued relevance is by no means guaranteed. But I remain optimistic because the same group of people that have brought us this far are still engaged, and none of the remaining challenges are beyond our collective ability to solve.

See more coverage of the OpenID Summit, including my talk, at The Real McCrea.

And here are a couple of video excerpts from my talk:

The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide (Google I/O 2009)

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.

Portable Contacts and vCardDAV (IETF 74)

Portable Contacts and vCardDAV
IETF 74
San Francisco, CA
March 25, 2009

Download PPT (81 KB) or PDF

You may remember the venerable IETF standards-body from such foundational internet RFCs as HTTP (aka the web), SMTP (aka e-mail), and vCard (aka contact info). So I’ll be honest that I was a bit intimidated when they invited me to their IETF-wide conference to speak about my work on Portable Contacts.

In addition to being chartered with updating vCard itself, the IETF has a working group building a read-write standard for sharing address book data called CardDAV. (It’s a set of extensions to WebDAV for contact info, hence the name.) Since Portable Contacts is also trying to create a standard for accessing contact into online (albeit with a less ambitious scope and feature set), I was eager to share the design decisions we had made and the promising early adoption we’ve already seen.

My optimistic hope was that perhaps some of our insights might end up influencing the direction of CardDAV–or perhaps even vCard itself. But I was also a bit nervous that such an august and rigorous standards body might have little interest in the pontifications of a “scrappy Open Stack hacker” like me. Or that even if they liked what I said, it might be impossible to have an impact this late in the game. But I figured if nothing else, here’s a group of people that are as passionate about the gory details of contact info as we are, so at least we should meet one another and see where it leads.

Boy was I impressed and inspired by their positive reception of my remarks! Far from being a hostile or dis-interested audience, everyone seemed genuinely excited by the work we’d done, especially since companies large and small are already shipping compliant implementations. The Q&A was passionate and detailed, and it spilled out into the hallway and continued long after the session officially ended.

Best of all, I then got to sit down with Simon Perreault, one of the primary authors of vCard 4.0 and vCardXML, and we went literally line-by-line through the entire Portable Contacts spec and wrote a list of all the ways if differs from the next proposed version of vCard. As you might imagine, there were some passionate arguments on both sides concerning the details, but actually there were really no “deal breakers” in there, and Simon sounded quite open (or even excited) about some of the “innovations” we’d made. It really does look like we might be able to get a common XML schema across PoCo and vCard / CardDAV, and some of the changes might well land in core vCard!

Of course, any official spec changes will happen through the normal IETF mailing lists and process. But as I’m sure you can tell, I think things went amazingly well today, and the future of standards for sharing contact info online has never looked brighter! Thanks again to Marc Blanchet, Cyrus Daboo, and the rest of the vCardDAV working group for their invitation and warm reception. Onward ho!

Social data sharing will change lives and business (DEMO 09)

Social data sharing will change lives and business
DEMO 09
Palm Desert, CA
March 3, 2009

Watch full video (via Brightcove)
I flew down to an oddly-lush oasis in the middle of the desert last week to attend a panel at DEMO about the future of the social web. Max Engel from MySpace has a nice write-up of the event, and a full video of our panel is available on Brightcove. Eric Eldon of VentureBeat moderated the panel, which featured me, Max Engel, Dave Morin from Facebook, and Kevin Marks from Google. In addition to a lively discussion, we each demoed our “latest and greatest” efforts at opening up the social web. Max showed the first public demo of MySpace’s support for hybrid OpenID+OAuth login using a friendly popup, Kevin showed off how to add FriendConnect to any blog, and Dave showed off some new examples of Facebook Connect in the wild. I showed our new Google-optimized onboarding experiment with Plaxo, and revealed that it’s working so well that we’re now using it for 100% of new users invited to Plaxo via a gmail.com email address.

It’s just amazing and inspiring to me that these major mainstream internet sites are all now able to stand up and demo slick, user-friendly cross-site interoperability and data sharing using open APIs, and we’re all continuing to converge on common standards so developers don’t have to write separate code to interoperate with each site. You can really measure the speed of progress in this space by watching the quantity and quality of these Open Web demos continue to increase, and with SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, Google I/O, and Internet Identity Workshop all still to come in the first half of 2009, I have a feeling that we all ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! 🙂

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