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

November 22, 2015 / joseph / 0 Comments

Interview with Ed Butler (photo by Kris KrÃ¼g)

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 KrÃ¼g)

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!

Turns out we still need Plaxo (or something like it)

September 2, 2014 / joseph / 19 Comments

Despite having helped build a startup 12 (!) years ago focused on keeping your address book up to date, despite the massive intervening adoption of smart phones and social networks, and despite being connected to an unusually tech-savvy cohort of friends and relatives, my address book is still a disastrous mess. Sound familiar? This thought always lingered in my head, but it confronted me full-force this weekend while my wife and I struggled in vain to produce an updated mailing list to announce the birth of our new son. We’d done this for our last child (sadly using a shared Google spreadsheet in absence of any more purpose-built tool), so we were only 2-3 years out-of-date, yet an astonishing 45% of the addresses of our friends and family needed updating, and the task was not easily achieved.

This led me to ponder why this seemingly tractable problem remains so stubbornly unsolved, and what, if any, hope lies ahead.

The false saviors

It’s hard to remember that when we started Plaxo in 2002, there was no iPhone, no Facebook, not even Friendster or Flickr. Our biggest opportunity was writing a Microsoft Outlook plugin. Since then, many people have said that the problem of out-of-date contact info would soon be a relic of the past. Smartphones would keep us seamlessly connected. Social network profiles would always contain our latest info. Number portability, Gmail, and mainstream messaging services would create long-lasting identifiers. The death of snail mail would obviate the need for physical addresses. And so on. We often worried about these trends, and in some sense they have each helped us get more connected, yet they clearly haven’t solved the core problem. Why not? A few reasons”¦

Contact info still changes frequently (esp. in aggregate). As mentioned above, nearly half of the people we sent birth announcements to last time physically moved in the past 2-3 years. Now in our age range that’s probably more than usual (buying a first house, getting a new job, etc.), but it’s still staggeringly high. And it’s not just physical addresses. I’m constantly wondering “is this the right email address or cell phone number to use for so-and-so, or is it dead / rarely checked these days?” Ditto for “who do I know who still works at [insert company here]?” Even using circles in Google+, I’m often wondering “gee, is my Googlers circle still a safe place for Google-only discussions?” Even when the info hasn’t changed, I’m often unsure if it’s still current. And of course I keep meeting new people, many of whom I haven’t ever collected the relevant info for (even if they wouldn’t mind me having it).

Social networks suck at contact info. As surprising as the staleness of our address list was, I was even more surprised how few of my contacts had their latest address in Google+, Facebook, or elsewhere online. Many of these people used to work at Plaxo, and all are online using social networks daily. Yet the info is either missing, stale, or not shared with me. Why? In theory, social networks subsumed Plaxo-like functionality, but in practice there are deep reasons why they fall short.

Contact info is buried. I have to click to someone’s profile, click to their about/contact tab, scroll down, and then hope their info is shared with me. When’s the last time you viewed your own “about” tab (let alone someone else’s contact info section)? It’s out of sight, out of mind. In fact, even my own home address was out of date on Google+ and Facebook until long after I moved. It’s just not something you naturally think about while checking your news feed.
You don’t want everyone to have your info. Even though most social networks provide a way for you to share personal contact info, most users don’t want all of their “friends” to have all of their personal details. I recall hearing back in the day as Facebook grew that more people were actually deleting their contact info because they were making more and more loose-tie friends who they didn’t feel comfortable sharing that info with. On Google+ you can (of course) use circles to finely control who sees your home info, and Facebook has since followed suit, but as my wife put it when I asked her today, “eew, I don’t want to put my home address on Facebook”. You have to trust the site itself, your ability to navigate their privacy controls (and keep them up-to-date as your life changes), and the site’s ability to honor your choices before you’ll use social networks to share sensitive info. For most people, that bar has not yet been met.
Oh, and that whole “data portability” thing. When I want to see if I have someone’s latest home address, where should I look? My address book? Only if I can pull in the info shared with me from social networks. Not surprisingly, Google+ syncs to Google Contacts, but everything else is still a walled garden. You have to go knock on all the doors. For every person you care about. Every time. Even though they chose to share it with you. Sound broken? I agree. But I guess we weren’t loud enough.

Smartphones aren’t smart about contact info. Your smartphone address book does a good job of following you around from device to device and desktop to mobile. The only problem is that it is syncing garbage data. You’d think that using it to send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, and looking up driving directions would make your address book fresher and more complete. But you’d be wrong. Chalk it up to app fragmentation and no one really trying hard to solve the problem in the first place, esp. at the OS level. Even at Google, the Gmail Contacts team is separate from the android “People app” team, and most OEMs bundle their own separate address book. Good luck.

No one’s helping you scrounge. Another fascinating if infuriating aspect of my recent Labor Day labor to update our mailing list was how often I could find the addresses by scrounging through my email archives, text messages, and manually entered address book info. I’d even been to many of the homes I lacked addresses for! In the absence of a good contact info syncing solution, most people still solve the problem “out of band” via existing communication channels (“leaving now, btw what’s your address in SF?” “it’s 123 Fake St., see you soon!”). Yet nothing is helping you extract, save, and aggregate that info for the next time you need it. It’s still a painful, manual process that you need to “get good at”. And this is for close ties–not random acquaintances–so it’s surely just an “entropy” problem, not a “stalking” problem.

The wisdom of crowds? Another trend I was sure would take off in the age of the cloud was some kind of solution for pooling contact info between families, friends, and organizations. At Plaxo we used to always have the problem, “Who’s got the cell phone for that new guy we just hired?” and the answer was always “someone in the room” (you just don’t know who in advance, and you have to ask them first). Many families still have a designated aunt who dutifully maintains the conglomerated birthday and holiday card list. And “hey Garret, remind me what Pete’s new address is?” still gets the job done in a pinch without offending. So why does each address book still start from scratch as if it were the only record of knowledge in the universe?

A new hope?

In the years since leaving Plaxo to help start Google+, I’ve talked to nearly every “address book 2.0” startup that’s reared its head. Apparently I’ve got a reputation in the Valley for not being “over” this contact info problem. Many have offered clever twists, but none have fundamentally addressed the challenges above. And perhaps unsurprisingly, as a result, none have saved the world from its frustrating fragmentation. So why am I still eternally optimistic? Because it’s a real, mainstream problem, there’s no good reason people want fragmentation to persist, and increasingly smartphones do participate in the events that collect or verify contact info. Plus there’s still the cloud opportunity for making each other smarter. So how might such a solution emerge?

When trying to solve any complex social problem, one good question to ask is, “What does the ideal solution state look like?” In the case of up-to-date contact info, I’d argue we still don’t know. You could say it’s everyone being on a single social network and using it perfectly, but is that ever going to be realistic? I’d say it’s more likely a mix of assisted sync and scrounge. In other words: help me collect whatever’s been shared with me via social networks or communication tools. And the place to do that is logically a smartphone (backed by a cloud-hosted account). Google or Apple are, in theory, in a great position to make progress on this, but I suspect it will be a startup that gets the job done, since it can be their sole focus and brand identity.

Such a startup would have to embrace the messy reality I’ve outlined above and turn it into a strength. Use all the available APIs and other tricks to help me find the contact info that has been shared with me. Keep track of when it was last updated (don’t make me guess). Parse through all my emails and texts for stuff that looks like contact info. Use my phone’s location history to ask me whose house I just visited when it doesn’t look like a business. Remind me what email or phone number each contact last used, and let me easily ping them back if I need some updated info. Help me build custom lists for things like holiday or birth announcements, and use that as an opportunity to ask for updated info. And partner with sites like TinyPrints not only to send those cards but also to send change-of-address cards when I myself move (something you should also be able to detect using my phone). Once you start gaining traction helping individuals keep their address books up-to-date, add a layer to pool it with family, friends, and colleagues in a privacy-preserving way (e.g. an easy way to see who knows someone’s phone number, but you still have to ask them to share it with you).

Is there enough here to build a successful business around? You be the judge. But is this still a real problem that real people still wish someone would solve? Abso-f*cking-lutely.

Personal Trainer: The Best Investment I’ve Made in Years

January 21, 2012 / joseph / 8 Comments

Growing up, I was pretty active physically. But after leaving home for college and pursuing a career in computers, my activity level continued to fall while my weight moved in the opposite direction. I tried numerous times to start working out regularly, but I would always fall off the wagon after a matter of weeks when life got extra busy. While I’d resisted the idea for years, last fall I finally decided to start working twice a week with a personal trainer, and the results have been fantastic–I now work out regularly and reliably (both with my trainer and on my own in between), I feel stronger, healthier, and happier, and my career is none the worse for spending the extra time I didn’t think I had.

I’ve told several colleagues this story (not surprisingly, many in Silicon Valley are in the same boat–working long hours and neglecting their health even though they’re aware that it’s a problem), and it’s inspired several of them to follow suit. And apparently I’m not alone. So I thought it would be worth recounting here both why this has worked so well and why it nevertheless took me far too long to convince myself to do it.

What’s so great about a personal trainer?

The biggest advantage by far of working with a personal trainer is that I actually go work out regularly now. That’s because my trainer puts our appointments on my calendar every week, waits for me to show up, and charges me money if I don’t. That may sound glib, but the core problem I’ve had for the past few years is that I couldn’t bring myself to work out regularly on my own. I’d get too busy, or there wouldn’t be a convenient time, or I’d be tired, or whatever, but the bottom line is it wouldn’t get done, and now it does. I like to think of myself as someone with a strong will, a good sense of discipline, and a rational, long-term outlook, but clearly I’m not the only one that finds it hard to “kick my own butt” into exercising regularly. Instead of worrying about exactly what exercises to do and how often, the “high-order bit” in fixing my situation was “just show up a few times a week and do anything“.

In retrospect, the solution is so obvious: success looks like you blocking off an hour on your calendar a few times a week to go to the gym, and doing that consistently for the foreseeable future. Rather than trying to convince myself to do this ad hoc on my own, working with a trainer ensures this outcome by design. It’s a classic form of the well-known “brain hack” where you force yourself into doing something you know is right for you by creating the conditions in advance, when you’re rationally detached, rather than in the moment, when your baser instincts are in firmer control. And since I pay for my sessions in chunks of 10, and my trainer books our appointments every week, it really keeps me “on the treadmill” (both literally and figuratively).

Of course, there’s more to the value of working with a trainer than just the “forced accountability” to actually show up. My trainer knows what I’m capable of, where my weak spots are, and what my goals are (I just want to be in decent shape, not a body builder or top athlete), and she tailors our workout each time to keep me working on the right exercises with the right intensity and variety. She definitely pushes me harder than I would work on my own (“you can do one last set, can’t you? come on…”), but she also keeps me safe by watching my form and adjusting or eliminating exercises if anything is starting to hurt or look weird. This in turn lets me “turn my brain off” by not having to will myself to keep going or worry about what exercise to do next or whether I’m doing it right (all of which I’d have to do if I were working out solo), and as a result I get a more efficient and impactful workout for the time allotted.

What took you so long?

For several years, “not being in great shape”–or, more specifically, “not having regular exercise be a built-in part of my lifestyle”–has been at the top of my list of personal problems I’d like to improve. I’ve been quite fortunate in terms of family and career (my big problem being “I just want to work all the time”), but I just couldn’t seem to get “work out regularly” checked off my life’s to-do list. Reflecting on why it was so hard for me to tackle this problem–even though I cared about fixing it and had the means–I think it boiled down to the following combination of factors, which many people in my situation also face:

It’s not a crisis (yet). I was never “dangerously over weight”, just a bit pudgier than I’d like, and with the situation slowly worsening over time. I gained on average about 5 lbs per year since getting married, though my weight often fluctuated that much in the space of a week, so it was the long-term trend that was a problem, but in the short term it was hard to convince myself “you’ve got to drop everything and deal with this now“.
I should be able to fix this on my own. As I mentioned above, I tend to think “I’m a smart, capable person, so I don’t need help from other so-called professionals” when it comes to solving my problems. Especially for getting in shape, I know how to do it, and my needs are fairly modest and normal, so I often told myself that getting a personal trainer amounted to “being a wuss” and admitting a lack of will power or discipline or knowledge, which was “unbecoming for someone of my abilities”.
It’s expensive. While I’m well-employed enough to reasonably afford to pay a personal trainer, it’s still a lot of money. My trainer is part of Google’s “g-fit” program, and I pay a subsidized rate of $50/hour (it’s often higher at private gyms). Meeting twice a week works out to roughly $5,000/year for this service. That’s a serious chunk of change, and although “it’s hard to put a price on your health and happiness”, it was enough to further fuel my apprehension about “taking the plunge”.
I can’t afford the time. Probably the single biggest deterrent to getting in shape was my inability to convince myself that the few hours a week I would need to dedicate would actually be worth the opportunity cost of less time working or less time spent with my family. As a “startup guy”, both at Plaxo and more recently building Google+, I always feel like there’s more to do and it really matters and the impact is real. In other words, I have the “first-world problem” that I love my job, I’m good at it, and I have the chance to really change the world and get well compensated in the process. So it’s always hard to pull myself away from that, even to spend time with my family, whom I adore and already don’t see enough. Thus taking even more time away to work something as “vain and optional” as improving my physique was just a hard thing to convince myself was a worthy use of my limited time.

Now rationally, of course, I realize that none of these arguments actually make much sense. Of course staying healthy is important and worthwhile, of course it’s a reasonable (and ultimately modest) investment of time and money, and of course “Parkinson’s law” will ensure that my career will not go up in flames because I spend a few hours a week working out. I know of plenty of people who are a lot busier and more important than me that work out regularly and swear by it, so clearly this is a solvable problem with plenty of “existence proofs”. But it held me up for years nonetheless, so I bring it up in the hopes that if some of these excuses ring a bell for you, this might help you fight back.

Is it really worth the investment of money and time?

Obviously not everyone can afford a personal trainer, but I would argue that for most busy professionals, it’s both achievable and money well spent. Most people I know in Silicon Valley work really hard and wish they were in better shape, but are actually bounded more by time than by money to do something about it. So once you convince yourself that you can afford the time, the money should actually be “the easy part”. If someone offered to wave a magic wand and make you healthy and active for the cost of $5,000, I bet a lot of people would take it. Yet that’s exactly what you can do by getting a trainer (and even cheaper if you do small group sessions or only meet once a week). It’s particularly convenient at Google because they have on-site trainers and on-site gyms with lockers/showers (so it really is as simple as “going to my 3pm meeting on the first floor”), but many people live or work near gyms and have flexible enough schedules that they can pencil in time with a trainer a couple times a week. And of course, as many people told me before (and I’m telling you now), it does come with a “high ROI” in terms of having more energy, sleeping better, and spending less time worrying that you’re not getting in shape.

In short, I couldn’t be happier with the choice to start working with a personal trainer, and if you’re anything like me, I bet you’d feel the same if you gave it a try. Let me know if you do (or have already done so recently); I’d love to hear from more people who are figuring out how to be healthy and geeky at the same time!

Winning Market Share in the Sharing Market

January 5, 2012 / joseph / 6 Comments

[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 something to share. Most people go to social networks because their friends are sharing there, and there is an inherit scarcity to compete for because most people aren’t willing to share something more than once (some may syndicate their content elsewhere, if permitted, but the original content is usually shared on a single service). Thus every time people are moved to share, they must choose which tool to use (if any)–a social network, via email/sms, etc.

Conventional wisdom holds that the main factor determining where a user will share is audience size (i.e. where they have the most friends/followers, which for most people today means Facebook or Twitter), but the successful rise of services like Foursquare, Instagram, Path, Tumblr, and Google+ shows that there’s more to the story. Despite the continued cries of “it’s game-over already for social networking” or “these services are all the same”, I don’t think that’s the case at all, and apparently I’m not alone.

These newer services are all getting people to share on them, even though in most cases those users are sharing to a smaller audience than they could reach on Facebook or Twitter. What’s going on here? It seems to me that these services have all realized that the competition for sharing is about more than audience size, and in particular includes the following additional two axes:

Ease of sharing to a more specific/targeted audience
Ease of sharing more tailored/beautiful content

Sharing to a more specific/targeted audience sounds like the opposite of “sharing where all of my friends/followers already are”, but not everything we say is meant to be heard by everyone. In fact, when I ask people why they don’t share more online, two of the most frequent responses I get have to do with having too much audience: privacy and relevance. Sometimes you don’t want to share something broadly because it’s too personal or sensitive, and sometimes you just don’t want to bug everyone. In both cases, services that help you share more narrowly and with more precision can “win your business” when you otherwise would have shared reluctantly or not at all.

Foursquare, Path, and Google+ (and email) are all good examples of this. Sharing your current location can be both sensitive and noisy, but on foursquare most people maintain a smaller and more highly trusted list of friends, and everyone there has also chosen to use the service for this purpose. Thus it wins on both privacy and relevance, whereas Facebook Places has largely failed to compete, in part because people have too many friends there. Similarly, Path encourages you to only share to your closest set of friends and family, and thus you feel free to share more, both because you trust who’s seeing your information, and because they’re less likely to feel you’re “spamming them” if they’re close to you. And by letting you share to different circles (or publicly) each time you post, Google+ lets you tune both the privacy and relevance of your audience each time you have something to say. Google+ users routinely post to several distinct audiences, showing that we all have more to say if we can easily control who’s listening.

Sharing more tailored/beautiful content is in theory orthogonal to audience size/control, but it’s another instance in which smaller services often have an advantage, because they can specialize in helping users quickly craft and share content that is richer and more visually delightful than they could easily do on a larger and more generic social network. This is an effective axis for competition in sharing because we all want to express ourselves in a way that’s compelling and likely to evoke delight and reaction from our friends/followers. So services that help you look good can again “win your business” when you otherwise would have shared something generic or not at all.

Instagram and Tumblr jump out from my list above as services that have attracted users because they help you “look good for less”, but actually all five services have succeeded here to some extent. A foursquare check-in has rich metadata about the place you’re visiting, so it’s a more meaningful way to share than simply saying “I’m eating at Cafe Gibraltar”. Instagram lets you apply cool filters to your photos, and more importantly IMO, constrains the sharing experience to only be a single photo with a short caption (thus further encouraging this type of sharing). Path just looks beautiful end-to-end, which entices you to live in their world, and they also add lovely touches like displaying the local weather next to your shared moments or letting you easily share when you went to bed and woke up (and how much sleep you got). Again, these are all things you could share elsewhere, but it just feels better and more natural on these more tailored services. Tumblr is “just another blogging tool” in some ways, but its beautiful templates and its focus on quickly reblogging other content along with a quick message has led to an explosion of people starting up their own “tumblelogs”. And on Google+, one of the reasons a thriving photography community quickly formed is just that photos are displayed in a more compelling and engaging way than elsewhere.

The future of social networking will be largely about making it easier to share richer content with a more relevant audience. Some already decry the current “information overload” on social networks, but I would argue that (a) many/most of the meaningful moments in the lives of people I care about are still going un-shared (mainly because it’s too hard), (b) the feeling of overload largely comes from the low “signal-to-noise ratio” of posts shared today (owing to the lack of easy audience targeting), and (c) the content shared today is largely generic and homogeneous, thus it’s harder to pick out the interesting bits at the times when its most relevant. But as long as entrepreneurs can think up new ways to make it easier to capture and share the moments of your life (and the things you find interesting) in beautiful, high fidelity, and make it easier to share those moments with just the right people at the right time, we’ll soon look back on the current state of social networking with the same wistful bemusement we cast today on brick-sized feature phones and black-and-white personal computers. Let’s get to it!

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

June 4, 2010 / joseph / 1 Comment

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!

Implementing PubSubHubbub subscriber support: A step-by-step guide

March 1, 2010 / joseph / 27 Comments

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 reducing server load on your site and the sites whose feeds you’re crawling. At the time, I couldn’t find any good tutorials for how to implement PuSH subscriber support (add a comment if you know of any), so here’s how I did it. (Note: depending on your needs, you might find it useful instead to use a third-party service like Gnip to do this.)

My assumption here is that you’ve already got a database of feeds you’re subscribing to, but that you’re currently just polling them all periodically to look for new content. This tutorial will help you “gracefully upgrade” to support PuSH-enabled blogs without rewriting your fundamental polling infrastructure. At the end, I’ll suggest a more radical approach that is probably better overall if you can afford a bigger rewrite of your crawling engine.

The steps to add PuSH subscriber support are as follows:

Identify PuSH-enabled blogs extract their hub and topic
Lazily subscribe to PuSH-enabled blogs as you discover them
Verify subscription requests from the hub as you make them
Write an endpoint to receive pings from the hub as new content is published
Get the latest content from updated blogs as you receive pings
Unsubscribe from feeds when they’re deleted from your system

1. Identify PuSH-enabled blogs extract their hub and topic

When crawling a feed normally, you can look for some extra metadata in the XML that tells you this blog is PuSH-enabled. Specifically, you want to look for two links: the “hub” (the URL of the hub that the blog pings every time it has new content, which you in turn communicate with to subscribe and receive pings when new content is published), and the “self” (the canonical URL of the blog you’re subscribing to, which is referred to as the “topic” you’re going to subscribe to from the hub).

A useful test blog to use while building PuSH subscriber support is http://pubsubhubbub-example-app.appspot.com/, since it lets anyone publish new content. If you view source on that page, you’ll notice the standard RSS auto-discovery tag that tells you where to find the blog’s feed:

<link title="PubSubHubbub example app" type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate" />

And if you view source on http://pubsubhubbub-example-app.appspot.com/feed, you’ll see the two PuSH links advertised underneath the root feed tag:

<link type="application/atom+xml" title="PubSubHubbub example app" rel="self" /> <link rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/" />

You can see that the “self” link is the same as the URL of the feed that you’re already using, and the “hub” link is to the free hub being hosted on AppEngine at http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/. In both cases, you want to look for a link tag under the root feed tag, match the appropriate rel-value (keeping in mind that rel-attributes can have multiple, space-separated values, e.g. rel="self somethingelse", so split the rel-value on spaces and then look for the specific matching rel-value), and then extract the corresponding href-value from that link tag. Note that the example above is an ATOM feed; in RSS feeds, you generally have to look for atom:link tags under the channel tag under the root rss tag, but the rest is the same.

Once you have the hub and self links for this blog (assuming the blog is PuSH-enabled), you’ll want to store the self-href (aka the “topic”) with that feed in your database so you’ll know whether you’ve subscribed to it, and, if so, whether the topic has changed since you last subscribed.

2. Lazily subscribe to PuSH-enabled blogs as you discover them

When you’re crawling a feed and you notice it’s PuSH-enabled, check your feed database to see if you’ve got a stored PuSH-topic for that feed, and if so, whether the current topic is the same as your stored value. If you don’t have any stored topic, or if the current topic is different, you’ll want to talk to that blog’s PuSH hub and initiate a subscription so that you can receive real-time updates when new content is published to that blog. By storing the PuSH-topic per-feed, you can effectively “lazily subscribe” to all PuSH-enabled blogs by continuing to regularly poll and crawl them as you currently do, and adding PuSH subscriptions as you find them. This means you don’t have to do any large one-time migration over to PuSH, and you can automatically keep up as more blogs become PuSH-enabled or change their topics over time. (Depending on your crawling infrastructure, you can either initiate subscriptions as soon as you find the relevant tags, or you can insert an asynchronous job to initiate the subscription so that some other part of your system can handle that later without slowing down your crawlers.)

To subscribe to a PuSH-enabled blog, just send an HTTP POST to its hub URL and provide the following POST parameters:

hub.callback = [the URL of your endpoint for receiving pings, which we’ll build in step 4]
hub.mode = subscribe
hub.topic = [the self-link / topic of the feed you’re subscribing to, which you extracted in step 1]
hub.verify = async [means the hub will separately call you back to verify this subscription]
hub.verify_token = [a hard-to-guess token associated with this feed, which the hub will echo back to you to prove it’s a real subscription verification]

For the hub.callback URL, it’s probably best to include the internal database ID of the feed you’re subscribing to, so it’s easy to look up that feed when you receive future update pings. Depending on your setup, this might be something like http://yoursite.com/push/update?feed_id=123 or http://yoursite.com/push/update/123. Another advantage of this technique is that it makes it relatively hard to guess what the update URL is for an arbitrary blog, in case an evil site wanted to send you fake updates. If you want even more security, you could put some extra token in the URL that’s different per-feed, or you could use the hub.secret mechanism when subscribing, which will cause the hub to send you a signed verification header with every ping, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial.

For the hub.verify_token, the simplest thing would just be to pick a secret word (e.g. “MySekritVerifyToken“) and always use that, but an evil blog could use its own hub and quickly discover that secret. So a better idea is to do something like take the HMAC-SHA1 of the topic URL along with some secret salt you keep internally. This way, the hub.verify_token value is feed-specific, but it’s easy to recompute when you receive the verification.

If your subscription request is successful, the hub will respond with an HTTP 202 “Accepted” code, and will then proceed to send you a verification request for this subscription at your specified callback URL.

3. Verify subscription requests from the hub as you make them

Shortly after you send your subscription request to the hub, it will call you back at the hub.callback URL you specified with an HTTP GET request containing the following query parameters:

hub.mode = subscribe
hub.topic = [the self-link / topic of the URL you requested a subscription for]
hub.challenge = [a random string to verify this verification that you have to echo back in the response to acknowledge verification]
hub.verify_token = [the value you sent in hub.verify_token during your subscription request]

Since the endpoint you receive this verification request is the same one you’ll receive future update pings on, your logic has to first look for hub.mode=subscribe, and if so, verify that the hub sent the proper hub.verify_token back to you, and then just dump out the hub.challenge value as the response body of your page (with a standard HTTP 200 response code). Now you’re officially subscribed to this feed, and will receive update pings when the blog publishes new content.

Note that hubs may periodically re-verify that you still want a subscription to this feed. So you should make sure that if the hub makes a similar verification request out-of-the-blue in the future, you respond the same way you did the first time, providing you indeed are still interested in that feed. A good way to do this is just to look up the feed every time you get a verification request (remember, you build the feed’s ID into your callback URL), and if you’ve since deleted or otherwise stopped caring about that feed, return an HTTP 404 response instead so the hub will know to stop pinging you with updates.

4. Write an endpoint to receive pings from the hub as new content is published

Now you’re ready for the pay-out–magically receiving pings from the ether every time the blog you’ve subscribed to has new content! You’ll receive inbound requests to your specified callback URL without any additional query parameters added (i.e. you’ll know it’s a ping and not a verification because there won’t be any hub.mode parameter included). Instead, the new entries of the subscribed feed will be included directly in the POST body of the request, with a request Content-Type of application/atom+xml for ATOM feeds and application/rss+xml for RSS feeds. Depending on your programming language of choice, you’ll need to figure out how to extract the raw POST body contents. For instance, in PHP you would fopen the special filename php://input to read it.

5. Get the latest content from updated blogs as you receive pings

The ping is really telling you two things: 1) this blog has updated content, and 2) here it is. The advantage of providing the content directly in the ping (a so-called “fat ping“) is so that the subscriber doesn’t have to go re-crawl the feed to get the updated content. Not only is this a performance savings (especially when you consider that lots of subscribers may get pings for a new blog post at roughly the same time, and they might otherwise all crawl that blog at the same time for the new contents; the so-called “thundering herd” problem), it’s also a form of robustness since some blogging systems take a little while to update their feeds when a new post is published (especially for large blogging systems that have to propagate changes across multiple data-centers or update caching tiers), so it’s possible you’ll receive a ping before the content is available to crawl directly. For these reasons and more, it’s definitely a best-practice to consume the fat ping directly, rather than just using it as a hint to go crawl the blog again (i.e. treating it as a “light ping”).

That being said, most crawling systems are designed just to poll URLs and look for new data, so it may be easier to start out by taking the “light ping” route. In other words, when you receive a PuSH ping, look up the feed ID from the URL of the request you’re handling, and assuming that feed is still valid, just schedule it to crawl ASAP. That way, you don’t have to change the rest of your crawling infrastructure; you just treat the ping as a hint to crawl now instead of waiting for the next regular polling interval. While sub-optimal, in my experience this works pretty well and is very easy to implement. (It’s certainly a major improvement over just polling with no PuSH support!) If you’re worried about crawling before the new content is in the feed, and you don’t mind giving up a bit of speed, you can schedule your crawler for “in N seconds” instead of ASAP, which in practice will allow a lot of slow-to-update feeds to catch up before you crawl them.

Once you’re ready to handle the fat pings directly, extract the updated feed entries from the POST body of the ping (the payload is essentially an exact version of the full feed you’d normally fetch, except it only contains entries for the new content), and ingest it however you normally ingest new blog content. In fact, you can go even further and make PuSH the default way to ingest blog content–change your polling code to act as a “fake PuSH proxy” and emit PuSH-style updates whenever it finds new entries. Then your core feed-ingesting code can just process all your updated entries in the same way, whether they came from a hub or your polling crawlers.

However you handle the pings, once you find that things are working reliably, you can change the polling interval for PuSH-enabled blogs to be much slower, or even turn it off completely, if you’re not worried about ever missing a ping. In practice, slow polling (e.g. once a day) is probably still a good hedge against the inevitable clogs in the internet’s tubes.

6. Unsubscribe from feeds when they’re deleted from your system

Sometimes users will delete their account on your system or unhook one of their feeds from their account. To be a good citizen, rather than just waiting for the next time the hub sends a subscription verification request to tell it you no longer care about this feed, you should send the hub an unsubscribe request when you know the feed is no longer important to you. The process is identical to subscribing to a feed (as described in steps 2 and 3), except you use “unsubscribe” instead of “subscribe” for the hub.mode values in all cases.

Testing your implementation

Now that you know all the steps needed to implement PuSH subscriber support, it’s time to test your code in the wild. Probably the easiest way is to hook up that http://pubsubhubbub-example-app.appspot.com/ feed, since you can easily add content it to it to test pings, and it’s known to have valid hub-discovery metadata. But you can also practice with any blog that is PuSH-enabled (perhaps your shiny new Google Buzz public posts feed?). In any case, schedule it to be crawled normally, and verify that it correctly extracts the hub-link and self-link and adds the self-link to your feed database.

The first time it finds these links, it should trigger a subscription request. (On subsequent crawls, it shouldn’t try to subscribe again, since the topic URL hasn’t changed. ) Verify that you’re sending a request to the hub that includes all the necessary parameters, and verify that it’s sending you back a 202 response. If it’s not working, carefully check that you’re sending all the right parameters.

Next, verify that upon sending a subscription request, you’ll soon get an inbound verification request from the hub. Make sure you detect requests to your callback URL with hub.mode=subscribe, and that you are checking the hub.verify_token value against the value you sent in the subscription request, and then that you’re sending the hub.challenge value as your response body. Unfortunately, it’s usually not easy to inspect the hub directly to confirm that it has properly verified your subscription, but hopefully some hubs will start providing site-specific dashboards to make this process more transparent. In the meantime, the best way to verify that things worked properly is to try making test posts to the blog and looking for incoming pings.

So add a new post on the example blog, or write a real entry on your PuSH-enabled blog of choice, and look in your server logs to make sure a ping came in. Depending on the hub, the ping may come nearly instantaneously or after a few seconds. If you don’t see it after several seconds, something is probably wrong, but try a few posts to make sure you didn’t just miss it. Look at the specific URL that the hub is calling on your site, and verify that it has your feed ID in the URL, and that it does indeed match the feed that just published new content. If you’re using the “light ping” model, check that you scheduled your feed to crawl ASAP. If you’re using the “fat ping” model, check that you correctly ingested the new content that was in the POST body of the ping.

Once everything appears to be working, try un-hooking your test feed (and/or deleting your account) and verify that it triggers you to send an unsubscribe request to the hub, and that you properly handle the subsequent unsubscribe verification request from the hub.

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! You are now part of the real-time-web! Your users will thank you for making their content show up more quickly on your site, and the sites that publish those feeds will thank you for not crawling them as often, now that you can just sit back and wait for updates to be PuSH-ed to you. And I and the rest of the community will thank you for supporting open standards for a decentralized social web!

(Thanks to Brett Slatkin for providing feedback on a draft of this post!)

HipChat is consumer-meets-enterprise done right — check it out!

January 25, 2010 / joseph / 2 Comments

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) approach to group collaboration within companies and teams–essentially group chat plus file-sharing done with the simplicity and polish of a great consumer app, but targeted at the enterprise. And it’s meant to spread organically and bottoms-up by attracting enthusiastic team members who really find it useful, rather than top-down through long sales-cycles to CIOs–in other words, winning by actually being better for the people that use it every day. You’ll be able to tell this from the moment you start using it–it’s distinctly “un-enterprise-y” in all the right ways, yet every enterprise needs something like this to be more productive and organized.

[ More HipChat screenshots ]

I’m excited about HipChat for several reasons:

First, the founders (Pete Curley, Garret Heaton, and Chris Rivers) are all rockstar talents and super nice guys; the best of the young web 2.0 “bootstrap from nothing and build something genuinely good that grows because people are using and loving it” approach that’s only become feasible recently. Whatever they work on, I know it’ll be well thought through and well executed, and it’ll keep getting better over time. These are good guys to know and watch, and they’re just getting started.

Second, group collaboration is a space that everyone knows is important, and yet that nothing does a good job of solving today. At Plaxo we’ve tried tons of wikis, internal blogs, mailing lists, document depots, dashboards, you name it. They’re always too complicated and cumbersome and never have streamlined workflows that work the way you need. One of my early surprises coming to Google is that for all their efforts and internal tools, the situation is ultimately not much better. Information is still spread everywhere across a variety of systems, is too hard to find and curate, and too often forces you to just ask the person next to you and hope for the best. Maybe new tools like Google Wave will make a difference here, but of course the more flexible and general-purpose a tool like that is, the greater the risk that it will do too many things and none of them just the way you want. HipChat may not be the magic solution to this complex problem either, but it’s refreshing to see the team apply a consumer-app eye and discipline to the problem–focusing on specific task arcs to really nail, and an end-to-end polish and friendliness that’s so clearly lacking from most other groupware tools.

This last point deserves its own slot: in my experience, the only way to really advance the state of technology making a real difference in the lives of real people is to subject it to the harsh Darwinian landscape of consumer software and devices, where if it doesn’t “just work” and provide a compelling and enjoyable experience, it doesn’t get used. This is the sharpening steel that’s honed all the best apps we have today, from gmail to facebook to the iPhone to boxee, and so on. And if you think about it, it’s the missing piece that makes most enterprise software so terrible–your company buys it, and you’re stuck with it, like it or not. The typical enterprise “fitness function” yields a much slower and sloppier rate of evolution than the consumer one, and that I believe is the main reason the quality of the two classes of apps differs so much. So it’s great to see an increase in companies willing to try and swim upstream to gain corporate adoption with a consumer mindset, whether it’s Google Apps, box.net, Yammer, or now HipChat.

If you work on a team, if you’re dissatisfied with the state of collaboration tools, or if you just want to see a really well done new app, I encourage you to check out HipChat. We used several early betas inside Plaxo, and while any new communications tool faces an uphill battle to gain critical mass of adoption and change old habits, enough of us had enough “eureka moments” using HipChat to see its strong potential and to wish that we could fast-forward time until more people are using it and it’s had even more love put into it. The next best thing we can do is to spread the good word and give our support to the team, so consider this post a down payment!

Sources of inspiration for 2010

January 18, 2010 / joseph / 8 Comments

Despite all the serious challenges the world is facing these days, I’m also seeing more and more that inspires me–cases where great things are happening to great people doing great work and improving the world in the process. Specifically, the following recent examples come to mind:

Movies: Avatar
Music: Lady Gaga
TV: Netflix HD streaming to Blu-Ray/TiVo/Xbox/etc.
Mobile: Palm Pre & Nexus One
Desktop: Chrome OS
Social: Foursquare

What do all of these have in common? They’re all cases of insanely talented outsiders changing the world by just working really hard and doing great stuff.

Everyone said James Cameron was crazy to make Avatar, just like they said he was crazy to make Titanic. They’re both such impossibly grand, expensive, and difficult visions to capture. But he did it anyway, and the work is brilliant, and the only thing that went broke were the previous box-office records.

Same thing with Lady Gaga: just two years ago, no one had heard of her, and she was just playing little clubs in New York. But using her incredible talent in song-writing and performance art, and a willingness to work insanely hard every day, she unleashed her strange and unique vision of music/fashion/art/performance and took the world by storm, becoming the first artist ever to score four #1 hits off her debut album, and at age 23 no less. If you haven’t paid close attention and think she’s just another made-to-order corporate pop starlet, take a closer look, you’ll be surprised (as I was).

Netflix is certainly an outsider when it comes to watching TV in your living room (it’s neither a cable provider nor a set-top box manufacturer), yet now that I can watch entire seasons of Lost in HD on my TV whenever I want–thanks to its Watch Instantly streaming and integrations with existing set-top boxes and gaming consoles–I find myself rarely watching “real TV” any more. And Netflix’s user experience is far superior–it knows which episodes I’ve already seen, so I can just pick up where I left off whenever I have a free moment. And if I’m up at Tahoe for the weekend, I can watch it there too on my laptop, and my episode history is kept in sync because it’s stored in the cloud. Brilliant.

Both Palm Pre and Android (hard to pick a favorite yet!) are up against fierce competition from Apple and the old-world mobile establishment, and neither company (Palm or Google) is an established player in this space, but they’re both producing excellent devices that simultaneously improve the quality of the experience for users while opening up more flexibility and power to developers. And they’re also making web development more of a “first-class citizen” for mobile apps. It’s hard to think of a more ambitious challenge than building your own mobile platform–hardware, OS, software stack, apps, and distribution in physical stores–but that’s not stopping these guys from having a major impact, and the game is just beginning.

Chrome OS isn’t even out yet really, but it’s already clear that the desktop will soon evolve to their vision where all important data lives in the cloud, and it will no longer matter if your computer dies or if you want to use multiple computers in different places–a pain that I’ve experienced many times, as I’m sure you have. Windows is one of the most well-established monopolies there is, so again it’s crazy in some sense to try and compete there, let alone with a radical new vision that does a lot *less* than the status quo, and instead re-imagines the problem in a new way. And yet people buy new computers all the time, so it’s not hard to believe that they could establish considerable market share in a short number of years, while forcing radical change from their competitors at the same time.

And perhaps closest to my own area of work on the Social Web, I think it’s noteworthy that the company that has had the biggest positive impact on how I connect and share with my friends in the last year is not any of the big established players, but a tiny startup that’s building itself up from scratch by making it easier and more rewarding to share where you are and what you’re doing: Foursquare. While I cringe at the amount of work they have to do to integrate with each separate social network and build apps for each separate mobile device (that’s why we need more common standards, of course!), they’re still able to deliver an awesome product with a tiny team, and their service is taking off like a rocket.

Why are these examples so inspiring to me? They provide reassurance that in 2010, two basic things are still true–perhaps more true than ever before:

You *can* win by being excellent and working hard to build a better product
You *can* win even if you’re an outsider in a field of powerful incumbents

It’s hard to believe in transformational innovation if you can’t believe in those two points, and it’s often easy to get discouraged, since these are such difficult challenges. But if those guys can all do it, so can we. In fact, it’s not hard to believe that it’s actually getting easier to succeed in these ways. After all, barriers to entry keep getting lowered, and the spread of information keeps getting faster and more efficient, so the good stuff should be able to be discovered and bubble to the top faster than ever before. If that’s true, then the new “hard problem” should be doing great work in the first place, and that’s the problem I want to be tackling!

What examples are inspiring you right now?

Joseph Smarr has new work infoâ€¦

December 18, 2009 / joseph / 61 Comments

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 unique opportunity to turbo-charge my passionate pursuit of a Social Web that is more open, interoperable, decentralized, and firmly in the control of users.

I’ve worked closely with Google as a partner in opening up the social web for several years, and they’ve always impressed me with their speed and quality of execution, and more importantly, their unwavering commitment to do what’s right for users and for the health of the web at large. Google has made a habit of investing heavily and openly in areas important to the evolution of the web””think Chrome, Android, HTML5, SPDY, PublicDNS, etc. Getting the future of the Social Web right””including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph””is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come. So when Google approached me recently to help coordinate and accelerate their innovation in this area, I could tell by their ideas and enthusiasm that this was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to pass up.

Now, anyone who knows me should immediately realize two things about this decision””first, it in no way reflects a lack of love or confidence from me in Plaxo, and second, I wouldn’t have taken this position if I hadn’t convinced myself that I could have the greatest possible impact at Google. For those that don’t know me as well personally, let me briefly elaborate on both points:

I joined Plaxo back in March of 2002 as their first non-founder employee, before they had even raised their first round of investment. I hadn’t yet finished my Bachelor’s Degree at Stanford, and I’d already been accepted into a research-intensive co-terminal Masters program there, but I was captivated by Plaxo’s founders and their ideas, and I knew I wanted to be a part of their core team. So I spent the first 15 months doing essentially two more-than-full-time jobs simultaneously (and pretty much nothing else). Since that time, I’ve done a lot of different things for Plaxo””from web development to natural language processing to stats collection and analysis to platform architecture, and most recently, serving as Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer. Along the way, I’ve had to deal with hiring, firing, growth, lack of growth, good press, bad press, partnerships with companies large and small, acquisitions””both as the acquirer and the acquiree””and rapidly changing market conditions (think about it: we started Plaxo before users had ever heard of flickr, LinkedIn, friendster, Gmail, Facebook, Xobni , Twitter, the iPhone, or any number of other companies, services, and products that radically altered what it means to “stay in touch with the people you know and care about across all the tools and services that you and they use”). When I joined Plaxo, there were four of us. Now we have over 60 employees, and that’s not counting our many alumni. All of this is to make the following plain: Plaxo has been my life, my identity, my passion, and my family for longer than I’ve known my wife, longer than I was at Stanford, and longer than I’ve done just about anything before. Even at a year-and-a-half since our acquisition by Comcast, Plaxo has the same magic and mojo that’s made it a joy and an honor to work for all these years. And with our current team and strategic focus, 2010 promises to be one of the best years yet. So I hope this makes it clear that I was not looking to leave Plaxo anytime soon, and that the decision to do so is one that I did not make lightly.

Of all the things I’ve done at Plaxo over the years, my focus on opening up the Social Web over the past 3+ years is the work I’m proudest of, and the work that I think has had the biggest positive impact””both for Plaxo and the web itself. Actually, it really started way back in 2004, when I first read about FOAF and wrote a paper about its challenges from Plaxo’s perspective, for which I was then selected to speak at my first industry conference, the FOAF Workshop in Galway, Ireland. Since that time, I realized what a special community of people there were that cared about these issues in a web-wide way, and I tried to participate on the side and in my free time whenever possible. After leading Plaxo’s web development team to build a rich and complex new AJAX address book and calendar (something that also reinforced to me the value of community participation and public speaking, albeit on the topic of high-performance JavaScript), I knew I wanted to work on the Social Web full-time, and luckily it coincided perfectly with Plaxo’s realization that fulfilling our mission required focusing on more than just Outlook, webmail, and IM as important sources of “people data”. So we crafted a new role for me as Chief Platform Architect, and off I went, turning Plaxo into the first large-scale OpenID Relying Party, the first live OpenSocial container, co-creator of the Portable Contacts spec, co-creator and first successful deployment of hybrid onboarding combining OpenID and OAuth, and so on. Along the way I co-authored the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, coined the term Open Stack, was elected to the Boards of both the OpenID Foundation and OpenSocial Foundation, and worked closely with members of the grass-roots community as well as with people at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, The New York Times, and others, often as a launch partner or early adopter of their respective forays into supporting these same open standards. And collectively, I think it’s fair to say that our efforts greatly accelerated the arrival, quality, and ubiquity of a Social Web ecosystem that has the potential to be open, decentralized, and interoperable, and that may define the next wave of innovation in this space, much as the birth of the web itself did nearly 20 years ago.

But we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot. And the future is never certain.

At the recent OpenID Summit hosted by Yahoo!, I gave a talk in which I outlined the current technical and user-experience challenges standing in the way of OpenID becoming truly successful and a “no-brainer” for any service large or small to implement. Despite all the progress that we’ve made over the past few years, and that I’ve proudly contributed to myself, there is no shortage of important challenges left to meet before we can reach our aspirations for the Social Web. There is also no shortage of people committed to “fighting the good fight”, but as with any investment for the future with a return that will be widely shared, most people and companies are forced to make tough trade-offs about whether to focus on what already works today or what may work better tomorrow. There are a lot of good people in a lot of places working on the future of the Social Web, and we need them all and more. But in my experience, Google is unmatched in its commitment to doing what’s right for the future of the web and its willingness to think long-term. One need only look at the current crop of Social Web “building blocks” being actively worked on and deployed by Google””including OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, OpenSocial, PubSubHubbub, Webfinger, Salmon, and more””to see how serious they are. And yet they came to me because they want to turn up the intensity and focus and coordination and boldness even more.

I talked to a lot of Googlers before deciding to join, and from the top to the bottom they really impressed me with how genuinely they believe in this cause that I’m so passionate about, and how strong a mandate I feel throughout the company to do something great here. I also heard over and over how surprisingly easy it still is to get things built and shipped — both new products, tools, and specs, as well as integrating functionality into Google’s existing services. And, of course, there are so many brilliant and talented people at Google, and so much infrastructure to build on, that I know I’ll have more opportunity to learn and have an impact than I could ever hope to do anywhere else. So while there are other companies large and small (or perhaps not yet in existence) where I could also have some form of positive impact on the future of the Social Web, after looking closely at my options and doing some serious soul searching, I feel confident that Google is the right place for me, and now is the right time.

Let me end by sincerely thanking everyone that has supported me and worked with me not just during this transition process but throughout my career. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by so many amazing people that genuinely want to have a positive impact on the world and want to empower me to do the best that I can to contribute, even it means doing so from inside (or outside) a different company. It’s never easy to make big decisions involving lots of factors and rapidly changing conditions, let alone one with such deep personal and professional relationships at its core. Yet everyone has treated me with such respect, honesty, and good faith, that it fills me with a deep sense of gratitude, and reminds me why I so love living and working in Silicon Valley.

2010 will be an exciting and tumultuous year for the Social Web, and so will it be for me personally. Wish us both luck, and here’s to the great opportunities that lie ahead!

Joseph Smarr

Page 2 of 9

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

Turns out we still need Plaxo (or something like it)

The false saviors

A new hope?

Personal Trainer: The Best Investment I’ve Made in Years

HipChat is consumer-meets-enterprise done right — check it out!

Sources of inspiration for 2010

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