And now Max Engel, product manager for MySpace Data Availability, is up.
What makes me, me? What I say about me. What others say about me (or reputation). What I do (or my activity). Who I know (or my social graph). What I create. The content I generate and share. Where I can go (my ability to authenticate). How do I allow my identity to travel with me?
The Old World: the walled garden. The New World: Data Availability. An enabler for connecting with all of the web. The social social network.
What is the goal? Make life simpler (for developers and users).
Max is showing Joseph’s “most building on the open stack” slide!
Why this matters to you: The walls are crumbing and the networks are growing through the roof. [This point illustrated by an image of an old stone castle overtaken by lush vegetation. Sweet!] The open stack lowers the barrier to entry for user acquisition on your site. Retention: you become both complementary and indispendable. Traffic: make your site and service a fulcrum. (Example Twitter.) Monetization: gain valuable insights into your user base by allowing them to easily plug in. Why this matters? Identity becomes an open stream that you can dip into.
What is available now? We provide APIs to get to content (photos, for example)…; authentication via OAuth; dynamic profiles (changes reflected everywhere).
More granular on profile access. Portable profile: age, current location, date of birth, gender, nickname, thumbnail url, etc. Cacheable: About me, body type, books, children, drinker, enthnicity, has app, heroes, ID, interests, job, looking for, movies, music, name, network…
Sowing example of Picnik.com. We can let users edit their photos where they want to and have it flow back to my profile.
Supporting OpenSocial 0.8.1 REST Support, which means MySpace is already supporting Portable Contacts. Sweet!
Why OpenID at MySpace? “Our user identify with their ‘vanity URLs’.” Over 90% of our active users have vanity URLs. We have almost 30 million users who are both OpenSocial app users and have a vanity URLs. These folks are primed to use their MySpace URL as their OpenID. Coming soon!
“We are embracing the OpenID standard for single sign-on for the web.” And combining it with OAuth to enable true data availability across the web.
“We believe strongly in working with the community to ensure compatibility with open standards.”
[My thoughts: Wow! MySpace is absolutely committed to the new “Open Stack.” Some have thought the big players might just be paying lip service to opening up, but MySpace is for real. If you have not been paying attention to MySpace Data Availability, clearly now is the time to do so.]
The Real McCrea 
[…] the slides from my talk at Widget Summit 2008, and you should also check out John McCrea’s live-blog off my presentation. I’m off to the Internet Identity Workshop next week, and will also be […]
[…] social networks, but across the entire web. John McCrea live-blogged my talk, as well as the follow-on talk from Max Engel of MySpace. Most of the slides themselves came from my recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo […]