Tag Archives: lukeshepard

May 20 2009
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Images from Day 2 of IIW

The Internet Identity Workshop is such a special event. Heavy hitters from Facebook, Google, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, and more, all rolling up their sleeves on the most interesting problems of the emergent Social Web!

Here, with little commentary, my images from Day 2 of the event…

Luke Shepard of Facebook and George Fletcher of AOL led a multi-faceted session on the issues of being an OpenID Relying Party:

Session on OpenID RP Lessons Learned

Session on OpenID RP Lessons Learned

Angus Logan of Microsoft led a great session on a more scalable approach to letting developers register for API keys:

Angus Logan of Microsoft

Session on API Sign Ups

Session on API Sign Ups

From a highly productive session on Activity Streams:

Activity Streams

The afternoon demo session:

Demo

Demo

Two towering figures in the space: Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and Luke Shepard of Facebook. These guys are pushing the envelope, fighting the good fight, showing what’s possible with OpenID (as a Relying Party), and helping the whole industry work through the issues.

Joseph Smarr and Luke Shepard

Joseph Smarr and Luke Shepard

Here’s to another great IIW!

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Feb 05 2009
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Open Stack FTW: Facebook joins the OpenID Foundation!

From the OpenID/OAuth UX Summit

It’s a great day for the opening up of the Social Web. The largest and fastest growing social network, Facebook, has sent their strongest message to the world that “open” is strategically important to them by stepping up to become a corporate member of the OpenID Foundation. Sweet! Breaking coverage: VentureBeat, CNET, TechCrunch.

Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach. As a first step, Facebook will be hosting a design summit next week at their campus in Palo Alto which follows a similar summit on user experience hosted at Yahoo! last year. The summit will convene some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo!, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect.

Here’s the official post from Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer. The best quote: “We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack.”

This news will surprise (or even shock) many, but I see this as a natural and expected move. After all, Facebook has been getting more and more involved in the open community, attending the OpenID UX Summit last Fall and the Activity Streams meetup a few weeks ago. And Luke Shepard, from the Facebook Connect team, ran in the recent election for the OpenID Foundation Community Board. Luke will now be Facebook’s official representative to the foundation.

I have to say this is a great moment in time. I am so proud of my friends at Facebook who have helped make this happen. Props to Dave Morin and to Luke Shepard. You guys rock!

In related news, Joseph Smarr of Plaxo is being added to the OpenID Foundation Community Board as a result of Facebook becoming a new corporate member. (The rules of the Foundation have the Community Board expanding at the same rate as the corporate membership. Joseph happened to be next in line, based on the election results.)

Looking forward to next week’s OpenID UX Summit, hosted by Facebook. It wouldn’t be surprising if I were to live blog it!

Recommended reading: Chris Messina’s take on the news.

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Dec 12 2008
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8 Minute Abs? Try 8 Minute Facebook Connect!

When I wrote about the launch of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect last week, I tried to explain the similarities and the differences. One difference I suggested was ease of implementation. I knew that Google Friend Connect was really easy, that they had focused on “cut-and-paste a few lines of javascript”. But here’s what I said about Facebook Connect:

A second difference is target market. Facebook has clearly focused on major sites, like Digg, Hulu, and CitySearch, and while simple implementations can be done with very little coding, most will involve a bit more complex development.

Last evening, I learned otherwise, watching a video whose title says it all, “Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes“. Engineers from the Facebook Connect team, Luke Shepard and Wei Zhu, take you through the process with a great, straight-forward guide to implementing Facebook Connect. I’m not a developer, but I found the presentation really straight-forward. Great job, Luke and Wei! (Hey, Luke, you are welcome as a guest on The Social Web TV any time.)

8 Minute Facebook Connect

(I would have embedded the video here, but hosted WordPress has severe limitations around what can or cannot be embedded. Lame.)

So, it really will be interesting to watch adoption of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect in the “long tail” of the Web. I wonder if we’ll start to see directories that can let us know all the sites that implement either. Would be fun to check them out and to compare and contrast.

Anyway, I stand corrected. Congrats to the Facebook Connect team on a great rollout. I note that CNET is live today with their integration.

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