Tag Archives: OpenSocial

Jun 10 2009
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Must See Web TV: Joseph Smarr’s “The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide”

Late last month, Google hosted their annual developer gathering, Google I/O, in San Francisco. Among the many interesting talks was one by Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s Chief Platform Artchitect, someone involved deeply in all the aspects of the Open Stack. If you want to understand what’s going on in the emerging Social Web, you have to watch his talk, entitled “The Social Web: An Implementer’s Guide.”

Joseph explains how you can now leverage technologies for openness and interoperability to:

– Streamline your sign up flow
– Put an end to “re-friend madness”
– Kill the “password anti-pattern”
– Ride the “virtuous cycle”

His talk includes several demos. Check it out:

Alternatively, you can access the slides over at Joseph’s blog.

To quote Joseph, “The web is now social. And the Social Web is now open.”

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Dec 24 2008
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My Keynote Address at Last Week’s Open Stack Meetup

2008 is going out on a high note, with incredible momentum for the new Open Stack. I had the honor of delivering a brief introduction to the Open Stack at last Friday evening’s Open Stack Meetup in San Francisco. We’ll end up using this material on The Social Web TV somehow, but thought I’d share this you now. [Warning: Contains cursing.]

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Dec 20 2008
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For Posterity: The First-Ever “Open Stack” Meetup

I’m just back from a great evening in San Francisco for the first ever Open Stack Meetup, put together by David Recordon of SixApart and Joe Stump of Digg, and hosted at Digg. I had the honor of kicking off this historic event with a keynote on the Open Stack, as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. [Update: Video of my keynote is now online.]

The godfather of open, Marc Canter reports that there were about 100 people there, and I totally agree with him that “Joseph Smarr just kicked ass”. There was a mix of vision, description, and demo, and it all came off pretty well (given how little coordinated planning was involved). Plus, we gave out a cool new t-shirt that said, “I hack on the Open Stack”.

Here are a few photos I took. We’ll follow it up with video on The Social Web TV.

Eran Hammer at the Open Stack Meetup

David Recordon at the Open Stack Meetup

David Recordon at the Open Stack Meetup

Allen Tom at the Open Stack Meetup

Kevin Marks at the Open Stack Meetup

Kevin Marks at the Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Joseph Smarr at Open Stack Meetup

Chris Messina at Open Stack Meetup

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Dec 18 2008
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The Social Web: My Predictions for 2009

Gypsy_fortune_teller

It’s that time of year, when would-be futurists are compelled to publicly assert their predictions for the coming year. IMHO, I knocked it out of the park with my prediction for 2008.

So, I decided to go bigger this year, and make not one, but five bold predictions around the emergence of the Social Web.

Prediction 1: Facebook will begin its migration to the “Open Stack” and roll out support for at least one piece of it. Leading candidates: OpenID and OAuth.

Prediction 2: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will rollout support for Portable Contacts for their respective webmail services.

Prediction 3: Microsoft will implement OAuth, at least for Portable Contacts, if not more broadly.

Prediction 4: Microsoft’s “Windows Live” social network will become an OpenSocial container.

Prediction 5: Plaxo will so successfully prove onboard turbocharging via the Open Stack that they will abandon traditional email/password signups entirely.

These predictions are solely my opinion and are not based on any knowledge of specific product plans — except for maybe number 5. 😉

As with last year, I will check in on these at mid-year and end of the year.

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Nov 14 2008
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Smarr and Engel on the Open Stack, Part Two

Here’s more from the Open Stack breakout at yesterday’s first birthday event for OpenSocial, led by Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr and MySpace’s Max Engel. Joseph demos all sorts of interoperability made possible by the combination of OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial.

And here’s Part One, in case you missed it.

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Nov 14 2008
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Happy Birthday, OpenSocial!

There is so much “opening up” going on that we needed to do two shows this week for The Social Web TV! The second episode of our “double header” series is now up, one that we shot yesterday at the OpenSocial First Birthday event in San Francisco, hosted by MySpace. David Recordon, Joseph Smarr, and I were fortunate to have David Glazer of Google and the OpenSocial Foundation on a special guest. Happy birthday, OpenSocial!

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Nov 14 2008
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OpenSocial Birthday, Open Stack and the Smarr and Engel Show

The first of my videos from today’s anniversary event for OpenSocial is now up. The following segment was recorded late in the day at a breakout session led by Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr and MySpace’s Max Engel. Joseph and Max did a great tag-team discussion on the new “Open Stack” and how it can take us beyond the widget phase of social apps to the emerging world of the Social Web. The videos include several live demos that string together open spec building blocks, inlcuding OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, XRDS-Simple, and the OpenSocial RESTful APIs.

I was so impressed with Joseph and Max, that I really want to encourage them to work up a longer tutorial session that we can share with the world via video. If you have interest in how the Open Stack will bring about the open Social Web, you’ll definitely enjoy the following two clips. (Clip two to follow once it’s encoded on Viddler.)


Part I

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Nov 13 2008
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From the OpenSocial First Birthday Event

I’m in San Francisco at the OpenSocial First Birthday event, hosted by MySpace. I’m capturing video a, which I hope to upload later today or tonight. In the meantime, I’ll share photos along the way. Looks like there are a couple hundred folks here.

In just over a year, OpenSocial has achieved a reach of over 600 million potential users. There have been over 300 million app installs. And sites like MySpace and Hi5 are signing the praises of this new platform, and along with many others, contributing to make it more robust.

Part of the crowd for the OpenSocial Birthday event
The Audience Awaits

David Glazer of Google presenting
Google’s David Glazer Reviews an Amazing First Year

Lane LiaBraaten of Google on the Community
Lane LiaBraaten of Google Talks about the Community

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo was just introduced, as a slide that many have come to love is being projected on the big screen. It’s the “new open stack” slide, that shows OpenSocial as part of a larger open ecosystem, together with OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and XRDS-Simple.

A New Open Stack is Emerging
A New Open Stack is Emerging

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, now on the OpenSocial Board
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo Talks about Where We Go from Here

Okay. All for now. More later!

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Sep 19 2008
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Joseph Smarr at Web 2.0 on the New “Open Stack”

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:

A Common Vision for the Future of the Social Web

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:

The New "Open Stack" for the Social Web

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Sep 19 2008
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Thanks, SGI, for the Gift of OpenGL!

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!

The New "Open Stack" for the Social Web

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