You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2009.
Monday evening was historic, and the crew from The Social Web TV were there to participate and to record this epic moment in the evolution of the Internet. This special “highlights” episode is not to be missed. See: Mark Zuckerberg kick it off, with a great explanation of the strategic importance of open and interoperability; Dave Morin explaining the Open Streams API; Chris Messina on the Activity Streams open project that Facebook is contributing to; Joseph Smarr and I launching the Plaxo integration of Facebook Connect with support for the Open Stream API; Luke Shepard and David Recordon on Facebook’s announcement of upcoming support for OpenID, and more!
Wow! I am damn near speechless after an amazing evening at the Facebook “Technology Tasting,” for the launch of the new Open Stream API and the announcement that Facebook will soon be an OpenID Relying Party. Today really marks the birth of the Social Web. If you’d like to know my coherent thoughts, at least on the Plaxo integration I was involved in, see my official post on the Plaxo blog:
At Plaxo, we believe we’re on the cusp of a major transformation – the biggest change to the Internet since the birth of the Web 15 years ago – as the Web goes social, and the Social Web goes open. For that dream to be realized, we need to address the pain currently associated with using multiple social websites. We need true interoperability and true data portability, with users in control.
Today, together with our friends at Facebook, we are excited to deliver on that promise, with the roll out of an integration of Facebook Connect that demonstrates an unprecedented level of interoperability between two social networks (while preserving fine-grained control of privacy).
But here, for posterity, let me share some visual impressions of this historic event, via some photos I snapped from my front row seat at the action. 
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Dave Morin, Facebook
Chris Messina, Vidoop, OpenID Foundation, Citizen Space, and DiSo Project
Robert Scoble, blogger, early adopter and Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch
(be sure to check out Jason’s video of the event)
Joseph Smarr, Plaxo, OpenID Foundation, OpenSocial Foundation
Luke Shepard, Facebook and OpenID Foundation
David Recordon, Six Apart and OpenID Foundation
Getting the week off to a bright start, Facebook this morning unveiled a new “Open Stream API,” which gives developers off-site access to the core experience of Facebook. As TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, this is a big deal:
This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail.
It’s also a big deal in terms of Facebook supporting open standards. Rather than develop their own proprietary Activity Stream API, Facebook embraced the emerging Activity Streams open spec:
To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity Streams standard. Over the last several months, we’ve been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We’ll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.
This is awesome news. Props to my friends over at Facebook!
The Social Web TV crew shot a special episode yesterday on the Google campus, where folks from the OAuth community convened to discuss changes to the spec to address the recently-discovered security vulnerability. Chris Messina, Joseph Smarr, and I welcomed special guest, Eran Hammer from Yahoo! and one of the leaders of the OAuth community, to help us get the story straight. If this topic interests you, also check out an excellent piece by Marshal Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, entitled, How the OAuth Security Battle Was Won, Open Web Style
Back in the office after an awesome Social Web Foo Camp on the O’Reilly Media campus in Sebastopol. The event came off perfectly, with great people, fantastic weather, and flawless logistics. Thanks to the O’Reilly team and to David Recordon, Dave Morin, and Scott Kveton for organizing and hosting such a great event. Conversations at Foo are covered under “frieND”-A, so I didn’t live-blog or take notes. But I did take a few photos, and thought I would share them to provide a window into the nature of this very special gathering. We have made so much progress toward an open and interoperable Social Web since the first Social Foo Camp, last February, and this event did nothing to dampen my optimism for the coming months.
At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect, took the stage with an all-new presentation, entitled “Surviving (and Thriving in) the Online Identity Wars”. As usual, he rocked it! Alas, the talk was scheduled for 8:30 in the morning, which meant that even if you were at the conference, you might still have missed it. So, this post is for everyone around the world who wished they could have been there.
Putting 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 “virtuous cycle” of social content/site discovery. And six months ago, at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Joseph coined the term “Open Stack,” to refer to the combination of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, XRD, and OpenSocial, asserting that this collection of “small parts, loosely joined” is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In this new talk, Joseph gives guidance to sites on how to survive and thrive in the sea change of the opening up of the Social Web. I recommend everyone check out his specific “do’s” and “don’ts”…
Video of the talk (part one)
Video of the talk (part two)
Every few months, I like to check in to see how the ‘pure-play webide aggregators” are doing. [Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing at Plaxo.]
This is getting ever more complicated, as webwide lifestream aggregation is becoming the blueprint for the Social Web, as instantiated in the UX for Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, in addition to the smaller players who blazed the trail (Plaxo, launched mid-2007, and FriendFeed, a few months later).
Here’s the latest from Compete.com (which, like all other traffic-trackers, has its issues, but is generally directionally-correct).:
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch shines a spotlight on the FriendFeed side of the growth issue in a post this evening, leveraging Comscore data. Michael, in his poetic way, describes FriendFeed as being in danger of being “the coolest app no one uses.”
I don’t know which services will end up being the big winners in this emerging Social Web space, but I do know for sure that we will witness an explosion of innovation that will mirror what we saw in 1994, 1995, and 1996, with lots of losers and a few big winners. Personally, I am very excited to see what happens!
The opening up of the Social Web is accelerating on an exponential curve. So many things have happened in recent weeks that I have not managed to blog about. I hope my loyal readers will forgive me for not posting on the big rollout of MySpaceID or Google’s support for Portable Contacts in GMail. Anyway, onward…
I’m up in SF with Joseph Smarr at Web 2.0 Expo. I shot video of Joseph’s talk this morning, which I hope to post, along with the slides, tomorrow. Now, I’m at the Activity Streams meetup, that started with lunch, but is just now getting down into the working session. MySpace has a bunch of folks here, and is helping us get organized. There are also folks from Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, Nokia, Six Apart, and Vidoop, among others. This is a follow-on to the meetup in January, which I live-blogged then.
After a lot of discussion, David Recordon suggests that what we need is a bunch of examples of use cases and questions, asserting that we probably already have good answers to most of them. Joseph Smarr suggests a 90-day period of soak time for the current draft spec, with people implementing against it.
As usual, what I am most impressed by is the genuine collaboration underway, in which it is clear that none of the companies participating is trying to extract some proprietary advantage. This is truly an open spec process, in which the need for a common standard is far greater than any company’s desire for unique advantage. After all, webwide activity stream aggregation, pioneered by Plaxo in the summer of 2007, is now the blueprint for the the Social Web, as expressed in implementations from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and AOL, among others.
