Joseph Smarr

Thoughts on web development, tech, and life.

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Social Networks: Where are they taking us? (MIX 08)

March 14, 2008 / / 1 Comment

Social Networks: Where are they taking us?
MIX 08 (panel)
Las Vegas, NV (Venetian)
March 6, 2008

Download audio (WMV 43.9 MB, MP4 38.6 MB)

My panel on social networks at MIXJoshua Allen from Microsoft contacted me and asked if I’d like to be on a panel at MIX 08, Microsoft’s big web-focused conference, about the future of social networks. I’d never been to a Microsoft conference before (most of the events I go to are full of fellow valley startup people), so I was curious for the “anthropological value”, and when he told me the panel would be moderated by Guy Kawasaki and feature a cast of heavy hitters (Dave Morin from Facebook, Garret Camp from StumbleUpon, Marc Canter, and John Richards from Microsoft Live Platform), I knew I couldn’t possibly pass up this chance. Good thing too, because it was a remarkable event and certainly quite memorable.

The panel itself went very well–it was right after the amazing, boisterous keynote conversation between Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki, so the fact that Guy was also running our panel brought in an extra large crowd. The discussion was heated and productive: how quickly will/should social networks open up, when will OpenID be ready for mass adoption, what about privacy issues, and so on. Guy was his usual awesome self: light-hearted but pointed, and always cutting to the chase. There were lots of questions from the audience, and they came up to talk for quite a while after the panel ended, so they were clearly engaged and interested, which is the best thing I could hope for.

Another thrill for me was getting to spend a lot of time with the IE team. The first IE 8 beta had just been released, and it was clear the team was fired up to really make a leap forward in standards support, performance, and features. Along with dojo creator Alex Russell, PPK of QuirksMode fame, JavaScript guru Doug Crockford, and a few others, the IE team invited us to a VIP party with them that started in TAO (a ridiculously large night club in the Venetian, complete with a roof-top beach) and ended up in the “Kingpin Suite” at the Palms, complete with in-room bowling alleys. Man, these guys know how to party! And they were genuinely interested in hearing our feedback about how to make IE better, how to provide better tools, and so on. As a long-time web developer, I normally assume I have no visibility into or control over the actual browser, how it works, or where it’s going, and my job is just to work around its issues as I find them. So it’s an amazing feeling to actually know the people writing the code for the next version of IE, and to know that my feedback might actually have a real impact. That coupled with the passion of the new IE team members gives me great optimism that the web platform will indeed get a lot better soon.

Oh yeah, and they lost my suitcase :(It was an odd feeling going to such a large conference where I knew so few people, and where there were so few startups represented (most of the developers seemed to be from large companies, IT organizations, and so on). But I learned a ton, had a great time, and even managed to shoot some photos in the process. The only downside was that upon leaving the hotel to go to the airport, the hotel realized they couldn’t find my suitcase which I’d checked earlier that day. Turns out some bellhop put it in the trunk of another car by mistake, and it ended up with a family in LA. The hotel said they’d pay to have it shipped up to me, but I still don’t have it. Since I was leaving the next day for SXSW, I had to quickly scrounge together a fresh set of toiletries, clothes, and so on. Luckily nothing too irreplaceable was in my suitcase, and hopefully it will show up on my doorstep any day now, but yeesh, what a way to end a trip!

The Future of Social Networks (Future of Web Apps Miami)

March 14, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The Future of Social Networks
Future of Web Apps Miami (with Tantek Çelik and Brian Oberkirch)
Miami, FL
February 29, 2008

View Slides (slideshare)
Download MP3 Audio (37.3 MB)

In addition to the half-day workshop I presented at FOWA Miami, I also gave a talk as part of the main event with Tantek and Brian Orberkirch (who also has a great write-up of our talk) on The Future of Social Networks. I summarized my remarks in my previous FOWA post, but I wanted to add a separate post for this talk so I could link to the slides and audio (and video should be available soon as well). FOWA was a great event, and I’m eager for the next one!

Implementing Open Social Web support on your site (Future of Web Apps Miami)

March 2, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Implementing Open Social Web support on your site
Future of Web Apps Miami (workshop)
Miami, FL
February 28, 2008

Download PPT (3.8 MB)

I was invited to give a workshop and be on a panel at the Future of Web Apps in Miami. I attended the first FOWA in SF in 2006, and I really enjoyed it, so it was fun to get to be on stage this time. I’d never done a long workshop before, but I love talking about Open Social Web technologies, so I basically went through all of the various building blocks (OpenID, OAuth, microformats, OpenSocial, Social Graph API, friends-list portability, URLs as identifiers, etc.) and wrapped it in some high-level context about the emergence of a Social Web. The audience was very lively and engaged, and they asked a ton of great questions. So I was very happy with how it all worked out. These are the slides from my workshop; they’re a bit light since I was mainly using them as a reference to talk over. But hopefully they provide some useful jumping-off points to learn more.

I also gave a presentation on the main stage about the future of social networks with Tantek and Brian Oberkirch. Brian made the slides, which hopefully he’ll post too. My piece of the talk was called “Open for business” and it was about how being open can be good for your company, because it lowers friction to signing up and sharing, and it makes you a more relevant part of the online ecosystem. I showed demos of how you can sign up for Plaxo with an OpenID and pre-fill your registration info, discover and auto-suggest sites to add to Pulse using Google’s Social Graph API, and express yourself in new ways using OpenSocial gadgets. I think it helped the audience see that these open technologies aren’t just a cool idea, you can actually implement them today, as we have, and they work well enough to benefit mainstream users.

After the conference, there was a beach party at Nikki beach, and on Saturday, a bunch of us went with Leah Culver and Kevin Rose to attend the first Pownce Brunch to meet fellow users. We even managed to sneak in a little shopping and some beach volleyball. But of course we were talking about code and startups the entire time, since we all tend to lack that so-called “work-life balance”. 🙂 Another highlight for me was meeting Gary Vaynerchuk, the star of Wine Library TV. I’m surprised I’d never heard of him (since I’m into both wine and disruptive technologies), and he was super cool and friendly and is clearly having a major impact. He taped an episode of his show live at FOWA, and he and Kevin and I even came up with an idea for a side project that we may try to spin up sometime…

I returned home late Saturday night (thanks to Pete for picking me up!) and tomorrow I’m back on the road: GSP, MIX, and SXSW. Gotta keep spreading the good word!

Open Social Web: Coming soon to a conference near you

February 27, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The social web is opening up, and its seems everybody wants to talk about it. Between the technologies, companies, and privacy / control issues involved, there is no shortage of strong opinions. And at Plaxo, we\’ve found ourselves right in the middle of all the fun, both due to the continued success of Pulse, and because we\’ve been consistently vocal advocates and early adopters of the open route.

Perhaps that explains why I find myself about to head out on the road for nearly back-to-back speaking appearances at a number of great conferences. This is going to be a marathon, but I can\’t wait! I love to talk about these issues, and I love engaging with the community. So stop by and say hi if you\’re going to be at one or more of these events:

Future of Web Apps Miami: Miami, Feb 28 – Mar 1
Workshop: Implementing Open Social Web support on your site (Feb 28, 1:30pm – 5:00pm)
Panel: The Future of Social Networks (Feb 29, 11:15am – 11:55am)

Graphing Social Patterns West: San Diego, Mar 3-4
Panel: Privacy Management & Data Portability for Social Networks (Mar 3, 4:15pm)

MIX: Las Vegas, Mar 5 – 7
Panel: Social Networks: Where Are They Taking Us? (Mar 6, 2:30pm – 3:45pm) [filter \”Speaker\” for \”Joseph Smarr\” to see session details]

South by Southwest Interactive: Austin, Mar 7-11
Panel: Building Portable Social Networks (Mar 10, 5:00pm – 6:00pm)

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22-25
Talk: Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web (Mar 23, 10:50am)

OpenIDDevCamp was hack-tastic!

January 14, 2008 / / 0 Comments

DSCN5744I spent the weekend in SF at OpenIDDevCamp, hosted at SixApart’s offices. In the style of BarCamp and iPhoneDevCamp, the idea was just to get a lot of people together who were interested in OpenID, provide the space and amenities for them to work together, and let them loose. About 30-40 people showed up, including Brad Fitzpatrick, Scott Kveton, Tantek (with blinking wheels on his shoes), Chris Messina, David Recordon, Christopher Allen, John Bradley, Luke Shepard, and many more.

DSCN5748Over the course of the weekend, I got OpenID 2.0 relying party support deployed on Plaxo, and we found and fixed a bunch of little bugs along the way. You can now use directed identity (e.g. just type in “myopenid.com” as your OpenID and sign in on their side), and you can even use iNames (e.g. I can now sign in with =joseph.smarr). Thanks again to my hacker friend Michael Krelin, who did most of the hard work, and to John Bradley of ooTao for helping me figure out the subtleties of making iNames work properly. David Recordon and I also developed a firm spec for combining OpenID and OAuth into a single OP round-trip–it turns out it’s easier than we thought/feared; write-up to follow shortly. And Chris, David, and I came to a clear consensus on best practices for “remember me on this computer” behavior for OpenID RPs, which I’ll try to write up soon as well.

DSCN5747There was also a lot of great discussion about the future of OpenID, OAuth, microformats, and related technologies, as well as some lively debate on data portability (as you might expect). A personal highlight for me was when Christopher Allen (a co-inventor of SSL) regaled us with tales of how crazy and uncertain the process was to get Microsoft, Netscape, and the other big players at the time to all agree on a common set of principles that laid the groundwork for the development of SSL, which we now take for granted as an essential open web standard. It felt a lot like what’s going on right now in the social web, and the outcome there is an inspirational example to follow.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–I love living and working in Silicon Valley with so many smart, energetic, passionate, and fundamentally nice and optimistic people. To wit: I just gave up a perfectly good weekend so I could stay up past midnight writing code and learning the finer points of XRI resolution, and it felt great! 🙂

PS: If you eat at Brickhouse cafe, I recommend the “half ass burger”–it’s just the right size. 😉

Opening up the Social Web (SNAP Chat)

November 29, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Opening up the Social Web
SNAP Chat – What’s New in OpenSocial
San Francisco, CA
November 28, 2007

Download PPT (1.0 MB)

Update: PivotalLabs has put up the full video of my talk (.mov, 119 MB)
The folks behind the recent SNAP Summit have started a SNAP Chat series, and for their first event, they invited me and Hi5 Architect Paul Lindner to talk about OpenSocial and its place within the larger project of opening up the social web. I gave the latter talk, and then Paul did a technical tutorial and deep-dive on the nuts and bolts of OpenSocial.

This was the first time I’d put together a public talk on the broader vision of opening up the social web. I described the work that I’ve been doing at Plaxo to support and adopt open standards, Plaxo Pulse, the Bill of Rights I co-authored, and being the first company to implement OpenSocial, but I also talked about OpenID, microformats, social network portability, OAuth, and how these technologies all seem to be converging on a shared vision of how the Open Social Web should work.

This talk complements some other great recent presentations by Tantek and David Recordon on building an Open Social Web. It all feels so tangibly close now, and I’m sure after next week’s IIW, it will feel even closer. Once our new friends-list portability project goes live, things are going to get very interesting. Exciting times!

Video of WebGuild panel on OpenSocial

November 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak on a panel about OpenSocial for the WebGuild of Silicon Valley. It was a lively discussion featuring Chris Schalk from Google, myself, and Akash Garg from Hi5, moderated by WebGuild president Daya Baran. The event was hosted at Google HQ and over 300 people attended.

I talked about Plaxo’s implementation of OpenSocial as well as the larger context of opening up the social web. The video just got posted, and I’ve also embedded it below. Thanks to WebGuild for inviting me!

Tim Berners-Lee groks the social graph

November 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I guess I missed it with the Thanksgiving break, but Tim Berners-Lee recently wrote a thoughtful and compelling essay on the Social Graph, and how it fits in to the evolution of the net and the web so far. Definitely worth a read!

I was pleasantly surprised to see that he references the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web that I co-authored, as evidence of recent “cries from the heart for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites.” He echoes “the frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again,” and points out that “The separate web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing–but the system doesn’t know it.”

I can’t think of a more eloquent way to describe the work I’m doing at Plaxo these days on opening up the social web and enabling true friends-list portability, and it’s certainly inspiring to hear it placed in the context of the larger vision for the Semantic Web by someone who’s already had such an impact on fundamentally improving the ways computers and people can interact online.

Onward, ho!

Bravo for No Such Thing–Go see it!

November 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

My good friend Chris’s wife Annamarie MacLeod is an actor, and she’s starring in a new play called No Such Thing that opens tonight in San Francisco. Michelle and I went to see the final dress rehearsal last night, and we were both very impressed.

The play is essentially a haunting, impressionistic sketch of a man gradually succumbing to the stresses of work, life, and romantic rivalry. It’s a minimalist production–nearly bare set, very little dialog–and so much of the story is told through the expressions on the actors’ faces and their movements. It also uses projected video and sound, as well as creative lighting, to intensify the mood and add to the narrative.

The way I saw the play described sounded very high-concept. But it never felt hoaky to me, or arty-for-the-sake-of-being-arty. Quite to the contrary: I found the basic story it told to be very effective and compelling, and the minimalism draws you in and gets you to relate more personally, because your mind is filling in the pieces from your own experiences. I liken it to one of those pencil sketches of a female form by Matisse–it’s impressive because it speaks to you, and it’s even more impressive because it does so with only a few strokes.

The play is a 70-minute one-act with a cast of 5 or 6 in a small and intimate theater (which is why the actors can convey so much with subtle expressions and movements), produced by naked masks. It’s playing on Friday and Saturday for the next three weekends (except the Friday after Thanksgiving). I think you’ll find it’s time well spent.

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