At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect, took the stage with an all-new presentation, entitled “Surviving (and Thriving in) the Online Identity Wars”. As usual, he rocked it! Alas, the talk was scheduled for 8:30 in the morning, which meant that even if you were at the conference, you might still have missed it. So, this post is for everyone around the world who wished they could have been there.
Putting this into perspective: A year ago at Web 2.0 Expo, Joseph introduced the concepts of a “Social Web ecosystem” (with Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, and Webwide Aggregators), fueling a “virtuous cycle” of social content/site discovery. And six months ago, at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Joseph coined the term “Open Stack,” to refer to the combination of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, XRD, and OpenSocial, asserting that this collection of “small parts, loosely joined” is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In this new talk, Joseph gives guidance to sites on how to survive and thrive in the sea change of the opening up of the Social Web. I recommend everyone check out his specific “do’s” and “don’ts”…
Video of the talk (part one)
Video of the talk (part two)
The Real McCrea 