Today was a great day at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a *huge* turnout and lots of interest in the meme of “opening up the Social Web”. The topic gave rise to many talks and panels, and was featured prominently in a keynote by no less than Tim O’Reilly himself.
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo (a guru of all things “open”) brought his A-Game to a presentation on the emergence of the open Social Web. He laid out a vision for an ecosystem with the user at the center, an explosive growth in the number of socially-enabled sites, and intermediating between the user and those sites, a new service layer, comprised of identity providers, content aggregators, and (the missing piece of the puzzle) social graph providers.
His talk got rave reviews in the Twittersphere (and in “meat space”). I captured most of it on video, so will share various nuggets. Here’s the first clip I’ve uploaded, where Joseph lays down the vision for the ecosystem:
Joseph’s post on his talk, including a link to download his slides, is here.
The Real McCrea 
[…] twitter-sphere. My talk was live-blogged by Andrew Mager and Mark Scrimshire (thanks, guys!), and John McCrea even shot some […]
[…] Plaxo articulates with great clarity one area in which we clearly are not “done yet,” deploying a new service layer that will remove the friction of the Social […]
[…] “gets” the Social Web; becomes an “aggregator” – April 24: Joseph Smarr articulates a comprehensive vision for the Social Web – May 8: MySpace announces “Data Availability,” kicking off an […]
Good post.
[…] this into perspective: A year ago at Web 2.0 Expo, Joseph introduced the concepts of a “Social Web ecosystem” (with Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, and Webwide Aggregators), fueling a […]