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What a great SXSW!
We used Twitter to create a “flash party” at the Chuggin’ Monkey after we ran into Gary Vaynerchuk on the street:
I dared Joseph Smarr, my partner-in-crime from Plaxo, to work the word “salamander” into his panel on OpenID in the enterprise, with hopes he could liven up the topic. To my surprise, he did, saying something like “ownership of user-generated content via open platforms is a slippery salamander”. Several of us broke out in applause, the tweeting and re-tweeting began:
We recovered from the awesome Facebook party at Pangea with a meetup at the the Hula Hut on the lake. This picture I call “Socializing 2.0″. (Note the extreme focus on smartphones. 
Facebook’s Dave Morin, who hails from Montana, was sporting some sweet new cowboy boots and talking about a cool idea that might get more of us to get our own:
On Monday night, I got to meet the lovely Julia Allison, while hanging out with David Recordon, Dave Morin, and Josh Elman.
We were talking about the Social Foo Camp coming up, and how it actually involves camping. So I asked…
Oh, and we shot two episodes of the Social Web TV with my new Flip Mino HD. One with Joe Hewitt of Facebook on their announcement of Facebook Connect for iPhone and one with Josh Elman of Facebook and Kalya Hamlin, a.k.a “Identity Woman,” about real identities.
All in all, despite the sour macroeconomic evironment, it was an uplifting event. We need to innovate our way out of the current mess, and I see great things happening to accelerate the emergence of the Social Web, which will enable a wave of entrepreneurship as large or larger than anything we’ve seen since the birth of the Web 15 years ago.
In these early days of the emergence of the Social Web, we’re never surprised when the services we use do not work together. Fragmentation and frustration rule the day, and 15 years into the consumer Internet revolution, we are still doing lots of things manually that will *someday* happen “magically” in the cloud.
Well, today I experienced a little bit of that near-future magic, and I wanted to share it with you…
First, the context. Plaxo [disclosure/reminder: my employer] rolled out a new release today that included a first-class integration with TripIt, a travel itinerary service that I had heard good things about from my colleague Joseph Smarr, but never actually signed up for. Well, it was also the day before our flight down to Austin for SXSW and a week before my flight to Las Vegas for Microsoft’s MIX 09 to speak on a panel about Activity Streams. So, it was unavoidable that I should check out TripIt and set up an Activity Stream from it into Plaxo.
First, I went to Outlook, where I had an email from Carson Wagonlit, our company’s official travel agency. I clicked on the link to view my itinerary, and was surprised to see an “Add to TripIt” link. A lightbox popped, prompting me to email the itinerary, which was as simple as typing in my email address. Yep. No heavyweight registration step, just kicking off my relationship with TripIt wid the act of emailing a single itinerary! Sweet.
I was instructed to check my inbox for an email from TripIt, and moments later it arrived. It included a link to my itinerary on TripIt, which I clicked on. After filling in just a couple pieces of info and choosing a password, I was a full-fledged TripIt member, all set up and ready to go.
I went back to Plaxo to add the TripIt feed. This functionality is *way* more buried than it ought to be, but since I work at Plaxo, I knew exactly where to go. (Do you think maybe we’ll make this more prominent soon? I do.) This is what I saw:
I chose Friends and Family, since I don’t want my travel plans shared with all my business connections (or the world, for that matter). I clicked on “Connect your TripIt account” and saw this in a popup:
So I signed in with my new TripIt credentials and saw the TripIt consent page that was asking if I wanted to grant Plaxo access to my private TripIt feed (Activity Stream). It’s yet another great example of the power of the open standard OAuth:
I clicked on the “Grant access” button, and I was done. I had a TripIt account, and my Activity Stream from it was now flowing into Plaxo, sharing my itineraries with my family and friends. Not long after I saw this in my Plaxo Pulse stream:
There are so many things about this that are way cool. First, the event looks great, because it includes more details than most third-party feeds into Social Web aggregators. Second, this is a private feed, shared with only the subset of my connections that I choose to share it with. Third, they can (and did) comment on it, sparking interesting conversations. Fourth, they can get the info about my travel plans, though not in a level of detail that I would be uncomfortable with. And fifith, I see a link that is only visible to me, which connects to the full itinerary details over at TripIt. Pretty sweet, huh?
But that’s not all. When I go to my Plaxo calendar, I see my trip to Austin for SXSW and my trip to Vegas for MIX 09 are there, automatically injected as a result of connecting my private Activity Stream to Plaxo.
This is a *great* example of data portability with the user in control, and a glimpse into the world of the Social Web we all want to bring about. If you’re heading to SXSW, give it a whirl!
The seduction was slow, and I played hard to get. And quite frankly, at times I thought for sure that I didn’t want to fall in love…with Facebook. But, I must admit, I’m now head over heels.
It started with occasional visits, guilty little glimpses into that once-college-only world. A few connections to some friends. Over the months, I wasn’t even really aware that I was slowly building up my “social graph” there, but recently I noticed the velocity was picking up, as fraternity brothers, high school friends, coworkers, and even my next door neighbor connected with me there.
Also, along the way, I came to know the Facebook team, folks like Dave Morin, Luke Shepard, Josh Elman, and Julie Zhuo (and many more) through events like the OpenID Design Summit. Heck, I even got to build a relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, in part by accidentally stumbling on to his Twitter account, which led to a bunch on exchanges with him. (Including this awesome tweet, in which he let me know he’s a fan of our weekly video podcast The Social Web TV.)
And Facebook, which could have used it’s market leadership position to attempt to build “Walled Garden 2.0,” instead has been moving boldly down an ever more open pathway. My friend David Recordon said it well recently in a post entitled Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden.
But, at the end of the day, it is the great product the team has built that kept pulling me back (via the way it has engaged my real-world friends from various facets of my life). Tonight, I was delighted to see the new design. It addresses all of the things I was most hoping would be improved. I know I will be giving more of my attention to this app (at the expense of more traditional media).
Okay, I’ve gone over the top with this post, but I’m glad I got this off my chest. Why is all of this significant? The Web is going social (with a big help from Facebook), and the Social Web is going open (along with Facebook). That means we’re on the cusp of a massive wave of change that will unleash an innovation explosion.
Oh, and the “pie” is about to get much bigger for companies like Plaxo (my employer) and many, many others. The zero-sum game is not what we’re playing.
Have Facebook’s recent moves left your wondering? New TOS. Bad reaction. Old TOS. New statement of rights and new governance model. What’s going on here? Joseph Smarr and I try to make sense of it all in this week’s episode of The Social Web TV:
