Joseph Smarr

Thoughts on web development, tech, and life.

Category: Personal (Page 3 of 4)

BarCampBlock exemplifies Silicon Valley

August 20, 2007 / / 1 Comment

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.

BarCampBlockCase 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 startups. The basic idea is that when we go to conferences and events, the major benefit is the chance to meet and talk with other like-minded people, so why do we need the conference at all? Just organize an open event where people will show up and figure out how to spend their time together.

BarCampBlock organizersIt was organized by a few people (mainly Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, and Tantek Çelik) in a short amount of time, and with essentially no budget. It was promoted purely by word of mouth and blogging, and yet not only was there an amazing turnout, nearly 100 companies stepped up to help show their support and sponsor the event. Even Plaxo kicked in a sponsorship, which was a no-brainer since they cleverly set the max contribution at $300 to prevent the possibility of an arms race. And then, like magic, people showed up, organized, and we had a productive and fun weekend figuring out the future.

I just have to stop and reflect on how unusual and awesome it is that events like this can and do take place here with relative ease here. It’s only possible because of the combination of (a) ambitious would-be organizers, (b) a community of people who care enough about what they’re doing to spend a perfectly good weekend networking and nerding with their cohort, and (c) a plethora of companies that care enough about being a part of the community to pool their resources and make events like this possible.

Social network portability sessionIt also requires the flat, meritocratic, egalitarian cultural norms of the area. The important people show up and hang out like everyone else; they’re not hard to find. In my own sphere of opening up the social web, the big deal recently was Brad Fitzpatrick’s (founder of LiveJournal, creator of OpenID, now at Google) new manifesto on how to do an end-run around uncooperative companies and get the ball rolling now. It had already spurred a hot conversation, and yet the next morning there he was (down from SF, mind you), talking to whomever was interested.

John McCrea engages in 'grass-roots marketing'We ended up hosting a session together on social network portability, and it was packed. It must have gone well, because the rest of the evening people kept coming up to me to express their shared passion for what we’re doing. In fact, enough people gave me their free drink tickets out of tribute that I couldn’t finish them all! Now that’s what I call “work hard, play hard”. 🙂

In a funny way, BarCamp shares the same spirit (and initial impetus) as Lunch 2.0–we’re all living here to be a part of this community, so let’s get together. The cost is small and readily obtainable, and the results of meeting up are never predictable but always valuable.

Anyway, congratz to the organizers, you did an amazing job! And congratz to us all for taking advantage of opportunities like this and not waiting to be told what to work on. As usual, there are plenty of photos from me and others.

Smashing Pumpkins blew me away again

August 1, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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. It was this wonderfully raw feeling of just seeing some “normal guys on stage” playing music–who happened to be extremely talented. 🙂

And get this–they played for over 3 hours. I didn’t get out of the show until after 1am! They played for 2 1/2 hours straight without taking a break, and then did two encores (finishing with a 10+ min improvised version of silverfuck). And this is the 11th show in a row they’ve played here (the last show in the series is tomorrow). How do they have the stamina to do this every night?! Amazing. I wish I could have gotten tickets for more of their shows, but they sold out in literally about 90 seconds, so I was lucky to even get the pair of tickets I got.

Of the 3+ hours they played, I’d say >1 hour was new unreleased material they’d recently written, including a number of beautiful acoustic pieces. They also performed a 30-minute song called Gossamer that was originally supposed to be on Zeitgeist. I had the good fortune to be standing next to a serious pumpkin-head who had been to 10 of the shows and new all the new stuff by heart already. I asked him how he knew the names of these unreleased songs and he said the sound board in the back displays the name of each song and fans post the info online. Crowd-sourcing at work!

Highlights for me included a hard-rocking electric rendition of Tonight, Tonight, the performance of To Sheila, in which the full band kicked in half way through, and a completely deconstructed new version of Heavy Metal Machine. Luckily someone’s already posted the set list from last night, and there are tons of photos and videos already online as well. Gotta love the internets!

Congrats to David Recordon!

July 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

David Record receives an Open Source Award at OSCONYesterday 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 friend and mentor to me throughout my involvement with OpenID. Even when he was traveling all around the world (which he does a lot for his job), he always made time to help answer questions and debug issues (including once over Google Talk from an international airport while his flight was being boarded!)

I’m sure I’m not the only one he’s been so helpful to, and his passion and positive attitude was clearly not lost on Google and O’Reilly. Congrats David, your recognition is much deserved. And viva OpenID!!

More on my new role at Plaxo

July 9, 2007 / / 2 Comments

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 position to help keep track of who you know and what they’re doing across all the various sites and services you and your contacts use.

So many services these days are driven by sharing content with your friends/contacts/etc. and yet the problem of wiring up who you know on each of these services and keeping that up-to-date is as unsolved as ever. At best you get a one-time auto-import from webmail providers, but if we’ve learned anything at Plaxo, it’s that persistent sync with your existing address book(s) is the real ticket, and everything else falls short of what users really want–that any time I meet someone new or they join a new service, I can automatically find out about it and stay in touch with them without leaving my existing tools. It’s a hard problem, and one that’s not core to most companies, but it’s Plaxo’s bread-and-butter so we’re eager to dive in.

Actually, It’s kind of funny in retrospect that Plaxo launched in 2002–before Friendster, before flickr, before LinkedIn, before MySpace, before Facebook, etc. Even way back then (heh), we thought the problem of staying connected to the people you know was hard enough to warrant starting a company. The initial pitch pointed out that the “explosion of communication tools” (meaning, at the time, email, IM, and cell phones) was actually making it harder to stay in touch, because there were so many channels to keep track of now, and they all tended to be incomplete and out-of-date. Boy is that ever more true today than it was five years ago! Just like before, all these new tools ostensibly aim to help you stay more connected, but they can only truly deliver in conjunction with a service like Plaxo to help you manage it all.

The good news is that these days we’re in the best position yet to make a difference in this new social web. We have 15+ Million people already using Plaxo, we have 2-way sync with most of the major address books and calendars out there, and most importantly we have built our service on open standards like SyncML, vCard, iCal, etc. that will enable others to pick up where we’ve left off.
This last point is really the starting place for my new role as Chief Platform Architect. We are fortunate to be part of a community of developers and evangelists that cares deeply about keeping the social web open–and thus interoperable. I’ve spent the last few years participating in events like the FOAF Workshop, MashupCamp, Internet Identity Workshop, OSCON, and others, trying to figure out how the community envisions building a user-centric social web and how I and Plaxo can best help. It’s exciting to see the fruits of these events start to ripen–things like OpenID, microformats, cross-site mashups, standards-based identity agents–and even more exciting to get to spend my days figuring out how Plaxo can continue to embrace them, help them continue to develop and flourish, and use our technology and resources to help get them deployed at web-scale.

The company is firmly behind this effort and everyone here gets why open is the way to go. In fact, it’s really the only way to go for us–if you believe (as we do) that people will continue to use multiple tools and services and that no single site will own everything (i.e. if you believe that “the web will continue to be the web”) then you can’t wire everything up in a top-down fashion. You have to agree on standards, keep users in control, and empower them to let their data follow them around wherever they go and share it with whomever they want. There’s still a hard problem to solve in the implementation and operation of such a system, and that’s where Plaxo (and others) will be able to run a thriving business. But believe me, we’ve already written one-too-many custom authentication and sync conduits and we long for the day when a new service can just point their standard sync endpoint at us and the rest is done automagically. The day where I can join a new service and instantly find out everyone I know there–including people that I meet or that join later on. That’s the goal, that’s what I’m working on. Let me know what you think!

Best marketing campaign ever!

July 3, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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 the promotion is definitely working. And I have to say I was really impressed at the thoroughness and level of detail put into the promotion. In addition to changing the entire facade of the store and the giant 7-Eleven signs to look like the Kwik-E-Mart, there were a lot of little references to past episodes inside the store.

Some of my favorites were Jasper inside the freezer section (“Moon pie–what a time to be alive!“) and a warning sign next to the sprinkled donuts: “A Mounds bar is not a sprinkle. A Twizzler is not a sprinkle. A Jolly Rancher is not a sprinkle.” And I had to buy the homer hat that said “This is everyone’s fault but mine”, though the actual quote is “This is everybody’s fault but mine“, heh.

(Quick rant: As a fan, I found it frustrating (though expected) that alongside these classic quotes were a bunch of additional made-up phrases like “buy 3 for the price of 3” and “they’re not called don’t-nuts” that were so clearly sub-par. The hubris to think you can just make up lines that are as good as the best-written show in TV history. Would you ever see promoters of a Shakespeare festival make up some extra Shakespeare-sounding quotes to toss in as if they were original lines?!?! And yes, I do find the comparison broadly apt. :))

Here’s a picture of me drinking a Squishee next to the Kwik-E-Mart.

We took some more photos from our visit and here’s a larger collection we found. AP also has an interesting write-up of the story–apparently 7-Eleven paid for the entire thing. It’s amazing how these deals get structured (after all, this is ostensibly marketing for a movie).

All in all, I’m very impressed with this bold and clever marketing move, and while it may be sad that corporate marketing budgets are the last haven for public art installations in America, at least in some cases they put in the extra effort to make it really special. As I remarked to a fellow Simpsons fan in line there, “well, I guess now if the movie sucks I’ll be slightly less disappointed”.

P.S. on the Simpsons movie web site, they have this tool where you can create your own Simpsons avatar by customizing the hair, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. using primarily well-known features from Simpsons characters. While the choices are sometimes limiting (many pages of hair choices but no choice in pants or shoes?!), you can still create characters that bear a humorously close resemblance to real people. Here’s my attempt at representing myself, as well as Plaxo’s founders Todd & Cam. 🙂

Celebrating our 2nd anniversary

July 2, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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 and Coit Tower. (Michael Mina is inside the St. Francis, so “getting home safely” after dinner just meant finding the right elevator, heh).

Here are some photos we took.

We both had a wonderful time. It really felt like a little vacation, even though we were only gone for about 24 hours total. Just getting a change of scenery, a break from your normal routine, and a chance to really focus on one another and enjoy life can have a major impact. We both left feeling so refreshed and in love. In fact. celebrating our anniversary was so nice that I think we’ll try it again next year! 🙂

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Great video interview about lunch 2.0

June 30, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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, watching TV using their wireless media center product. And I’m wearing a commemorative Netgear apron from their BBQ lunch.

I love living in Silicon Valley. 🙂

Here’s the video (thanks, Jeremiah!):

See you at Internet Identity Workshop

May 13, 2007 / / 1 Comment

IIW2007 Registration banner

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 the right reasons.

The progress of OpenID has been stunning–developing the standard, building libraries, folding in related projects, and getting broad support–and I think we may well start to see its adoption hit the mainstream this year (we’re certainly playing with it at Plaxo these days).

Like other workshops and conferences that I go to, this will also be an opportunity to catch up with a lot of friends that I (for whatever reason) seem to only find time to see at events like these. So if you’re planning to attend, come say hi or give me a call (my latest contact info is linked to from my blog sidebar, thanks to Plaxo of course).

See you there, js

Has it really been five years already??

March 29, 2007 / / 1 Comment

My Stanford class book pageI can’t believe it, but Stanford is already telling me to get ready for my five-year college reunion this fall. Five years–that’s as long as I was in college (including my Master’s degree) but this five years sure went by a lot faster than the previous five! Then again, I just passed my five-year anniversary at Plaxo (the math is a bit funny because I started working at Plaxo before I finished my MS, which btw is not advisable for one’s sanity).

Anyway as part of the reunion they asked everyone to make a page for a “class book” that they’ll be distributing. It’s a one-pager where you share some of you Stanford memories and give an update on your life since graduating. I think they expected most people to draw their class book page by hand and snail-mail it in or use their web-based pseudo-WYSIWIG editor, but I wanted a bit more control. So I downloaded the template PDF and opened it in Adobe Illustrator, which converted it to line-art (wow–product compatibility, who knew?!). Then I was able to add the type and graphics in Illustrator and save the final copy back out to a PDF.

For me, life since Stanford meant three things: doing NLP research (this is the reunion for my undergrad class), working at Plaxo, and getting married. As scary as it is to consider that five years have gone by already, when I actually stop to think of all the wonderful things that have happened since then, I consider myself extremely fortunate. I couldn’t be happier. In fact, I could really use another five years like this one!

One quick technical note: Since I embedded lots of photos in my class book page at their original resolution (I just scaled them down in Illustrator so they would still print at high quality), the file ended up being almost 200MB. When I first exported it as a PDF, I kept all the default options, including “preserve Illustrator editing capabilities” and the resulting PDF was 140MB. Clearly I could not e-mail this to Stanford nor post it on my web site. So I tried again, unchecked the Illustrator option, and also went into the compression settings and told it to use JPEG for the color images (which of course the originals were, but the default PDF option is to use 8-bit ZIP). This made a huge difference and the PDF was only 3MB but still high resolution. I also tried the compression option “Average downsampling at 300 dpi” for color images, but that essentially took out all the resolution in the images, so as soon as you magnified the document at all, they were very pixelated (looked more like 72 dpi to me). Apparently just telling it to use JPEG with the original images is plenty.

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