The Real McCrea

Quick on the heels of Yahoo’s consumer-friendly implementation of OpenID, which really put wind in the sails of this promising open standard, a startup called Clickpass just launched a service that promises to bring the benefits of OpenID without the complexity of having to explain the technology to ordinary users. Plaxo is among the first implementers (in what has become the norm).

Good coverage over at TechCrunch.

It is great to see the building blocks of the open Social Web coming together so fast!

A great day for data portability! Google just launched the Google Contacts Data API. Another great step forward for Google, users, and the prospects for an open Social Web.

I liked David Recordon’s take! 

This is really  great news, especially when viewed together with other building blocks, like OpenID, OAuth, and the Social Graph API. 2008 will be a year in which the foundation of the web gets a major upgrade, enabling a wave of innovation. It should become easy to socially-enable any website, application, or device — with users in control of their own data and content. 

That’s the main theme of this blog — and the central strategy of the company I work for, Plaxo. Whether you call it an address book, a contact list, or a friends list, the answer to “who owns it?” is the same — you do! And, as is advocated for in the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, you not only own it, but you must have the freedom to take it with you, wherever you go. Google is helping make that vision a reality.

Here’s more coverage (along with my commentary) over at Mashable.

I got a kick out of this post on the Economy of Friending. It certainly resonates with me and the folks at Plaxo. We’re trying to develop the best set of features to help you stay richly connected to the people you actually know and want to stay connected with.

It’s been a long time coming. I had always enjoyed the morning ritual of reading the Wall Street Journal and the business section of the San Jose Mercury News. But in recent months, my enjoyment has been steadily dropping, as the content felt less like news and more like reprints of yesterday’s news. Why? Because I now get my news online from a wide variety of  sources, including Techmeme, TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Valleywag, CNET, CNN, Google.

When my Wall Street Journal subscription was up for renewal recently, I chose to let it expire. And yesterday, when a bill arrived for renewal of my San Jose Mercury News subscription, I called up and cancelled. And so, this morning, I did not have a pile of newsprint wrapped in a plastic bag awaiting me on my front step.

We are in the midst of a major upheaval in media, with the Internet turning everything upside down. The businesses of news and entertainment are facing forces of change that are at least as big as when cable came on strong. And this is certainly impacting how I do my job as a marketer.

So long, newspaper. Thanks for the memories.

Nick O’Neill has a nice writeup over at allfacebook of Charlene Li‘s talk at the Graphing Social Patterns conference down in San Diego. I really wish I had seen this talk. Charlene takes on the task of trying to predict the future of the social networking landscape.

One of her key predictions:

Profiles will “eventually evolve to universal identities,” leveraging OpenID, and the major players will be Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Plaxo.

That is certainly consistent with my views and predictions. 

I am hoping others who were there will also blog from their notes.

UPDATE: Here’s Clint Boulton’s writeup on Google Watch. And Teresa Valdez Klein’s take over at the Web Community Forum. 

Another link: Joseph Smarr’s tweet on the subject. 

And now Dan Farber of CNET has covered it. Later today he’s hosting a panel on data portability and privacy, along with Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr. 

UPDATE (Days Later):

Charlene has posted the general text of her address online.

Marc Canter, legendary software entrepreneur, CEO of Broadband Mechanics, long-time advocate for open standards, and co-author of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, recorded a video on the concept of “data portability”. Check it out:

One of the beautiful things about the emerging Social Web is that it is becoming easier for small teams to create socially-enabled websites and applications. As frequent readers here know well, I’m predicting an explosion in the number of new social apps in the coming months, fueled by open standards and practical approaches for data portability. If I’m right, we will see a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship that rivals what we saw in 1995 and 1996, when a small piece of free software allowed the Web as we know it to emerge.

So, when I read about Iminta, a new social aggregator, I was keen to see what their unique twist on a familiar plot would be. After all, the key to innovation waves is the launching of a large number of experiments — and a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” battle. That’s how we got Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, and eBay in the first Web Innovation wave.

Alas, for reasons not yet clear, Iminta has launched a private beta of a service that seems to offer nothing new, when compared with existing offerings from Plaxo* and FriendFeed. It’s also ironic that Iminta’s viral growth engine is Plaxo’s address book widget! I guess this “shot across the bow” is meant to be a highly visible test of Plaxo’s commitment to user ownership, control, and portability of their address books and friends lists!!

Early coverage of Iminta’s launch struggles to find differentiation. Here’s Scott Gilbertson’s piece on Wired blogs, and Rafe Needleman’s on Webware (along with the much-appreciated disclaimer that Rafe’s not in a position to do an unbiased review). Michael Arrington’s piece on TechCrunch points out:

“There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.”

Of course, it’s certainly possible that Iminta has a grand vision that they are working toward that will be built on the scaffolding of a proper-subset-clone of other services, but if so, it’s certainly yet to be revealed.

*Reminder disclosure: I am both a blogger and the head of marketing for Plaxo, so am in no way an unbiased writer on this topic! 

Great post by Josh Cotone over at ReadWriteWeb that covers a recent effort to visualize the Social Web by Andrew Shuttleworth. The map he created must be seen to be believed.

Here’s an excerpt of the post: 

“Data portability will allow users to theoretically mashup and interact with all of their social media information from a single place. While that won’t cut down the number of sites and services tugging at our attention, it does promise to make managing that attention vastly easier. Shuttleworth points to services like Profilactic and Plaxo Pulse that are already attempting to bring our online social lives under a single umbrella.”

I highly recommend checking out the full post along with the map. Way cool.

Also, not surprisingly, I recommend also Andrew’s original post!

Additional commentary here.

Quick on the heels of Yahoo’s game-changing move to support OpenID (with a great consumer-friendly implementation), the big players are all jumping on board. According to TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher:

“Confirming my TechCrunch UK story in early January, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM (I just missed out Microsoft) have all now formally announced they will be joining the OpenID foundation, taking seats as the organization’s first corporate board members.”

As Michael Arrington points out, questions remain, especially whether these big players will be OpenID “relying parties” (let users sign in with any OpenID), or just be in the business of providing OpenIDs to their users.

Plaxo, an early mover in this space, and the only major player out there that is just an  OpenID relying partner, certainly welcomes this move. Today, anyone with a Yahoo! account can sign up or sign in with those credentials on Plaxo (with OpenID being used in the background). Soon, we imagine, the list of OpenIDs you can use there will expand to include offerings from Google and Microsoft. Very cool!