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We just uploaded a special episode of The Social Web TV, shot on location at the Internet Identity Workshop at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Special guests include Max Engel of MySpace, Eran Hammer of Yahoo, Dick Hardt of Sxipper, Paul Trevithick of Parity, and Doc Searls of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I think you’ll agree that this is a “magical” episode!
It’s Day One of the Internet Identity Workshop, a semi-annual gathering of the thought leaders in the online identity space. This grass-roots event, which has been around for three years, now finds itself at the center of a space that is really heating up, with big mainstream Internet players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, and Facebook, all racing to outdo each other as identity providers.
Among the talks:
David Recordon (of SixApart, the OpenID Foundation, and the Open Web Foundation) had a great talk on OpenID and the great progress being made, with mainstream adoption in the U.S. and Japan, in particular. Not surprisingly, there will be lots of sessions on OpenID over the next three days, talking about a variety proposed extensions. Given all the recent announcements (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and MySpace), this is really OpenID’s time to shine. I took a few photos to capture the moment.
Photos from David Recordon’s talk:
Interesting talks on SAML and Information Cards, two topics I don’t know very much about. SAML is more on the enterprise side of identity. Information Cards seeks to span both the enterprise and consumer Internet space. Information Cards has a focus on verifiable claims, like “Joe Smith is over 21″.
Oh, and I snapped a fun shot of MySpace’s MAx Engel, who was at the back of the room, getting his laptop juiced, and working with totally casual posture. Max is doing great stuff to bring the Open Stack to life at MySpace.
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo just gave another great talk, this one on the “Open Stack” and how it is greater than the sum of its parts. The PowerPoint can be downloaded
here. Joseph demoed the combo of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and XRDS-Simple. And he shared screenshots of a Portable Contacts app for Android. Way cool!
Here are some photos of his talk.
Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect, and de facto leader of the Portable Contacts initiative, gave a talk today at the Web 2.0 conference in New York. Entitled “Tying it all together; Implementing the Open Web,” it was a rallying cry for developers to jump in and get working on the new “open stack” of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts. See converage from attendees Kris Jordan and Steve Kuhn (who quips about Joseph, “Dude talks fast”)!
Joseph asserted that the industry has now come together around a common vision for the future of the Social Web — a vision that abandons the walled garden model in favor of a new services layer that interconnects social hubs with the rest of the web. The service layer is comprised of Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, and Content Aggregators:
And, indeed, that is the vision behind the strategies we see from Google (with Friend Connect; which launched for real today), Plaxo (with Pulse), MySpace (with Data Availability), Yahoo (with Y!OS), and, yes, even Facebook, too (with Connect).
Joseph goes on to observe that there are two pathways to that vision, one built on Facebook’s proprietary stack and the pathway chosen by MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, and many others, built on the new open stack:
I am so pleased to see SGI in a good news story today, after all the years of decline and sadness. Apparently there’s been a problem brewing with the license under which SGI was making OpenGL available, as in it was a license that was “accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative,” according to Bruse Byfield of Linux.com. The problem has now been resolved through a new license. Details can be found in a press release from SGI. The new license was applauded by both the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Khronos Group, an organization developing royalty free standards around OpenGL.
I’ve been thinking about OpenGL recently, as it helped introduce me to open standards, years ago when I worked at SGI. Back in late 1995, after I persuaded SGI to become the first licensee of Java, I tried (and failed) to convince Sun to follow SGI’s lead to make Java a truly open standard, rather than a Sun proprietary thing, with heavy licensing.
Now, as we work to solidify and gain traction for a “new open stack” for the emerging Social Web, I continue to be inspired by the bold idea behind turning SGI’s proprietary “GL” (Graphic Library) and into OpenGL.
The new open stack is comprised of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts. Projects as diverse as MySpace Data Availability, Y!OS, Google Friend Connect, and Plaxo Pulse now share a common vision (of an open interoperable Social Web) and are being built out on this common set of open spec building blocks. Each company can innovate faster by not having to waste development resources on creating one-off proprietary APIs. Each company can see more rapid uptake by developers, since those developers can write once and have there code work in more places. And each company can be part of the virtuous cycle of acceleration by contributing code to the open stack.
Exciting times!
It’s certainly a big week, what with the Hadron Collider finally coming on line, raising existential risk questions for the planet, as physicists attempt to recreate the conditions immediately after the Big Bang that gave birth to our universe. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, developers are attempting to give birth to a truly open Social Web, by stitching together for the first time the open spec building blocks: OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and PortableContacts.
You can participate yourself at the PortableContacts Hackathon this evening, hosted by SixApart. Or you can get the quick overview in this video podcast I did with Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr.
