The Real McCrea

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.