So yeah, it's true. Next week I'm excited to join Facebook's engineering team as the Senior Open Programs Manager and will continue focusing on open source and open standards. I haven't started yet, so I'll keep it light on the details until I've really started to dig in.

Two years ago when I re-joined Six Apart, I did so out of an interest in evolving social networking technologies along with brad and we – along with many others – have made an amazing amount of progress. This was my second time working at Six Apart and I'm sad to leave; they're a great bunch of people with some awesome stuff coming.

This past year as I've worked closer with teams at Facebook, I've been impressed by their products, smart people, and innovation. I hope to continue building on my past experience in working on making the web more open and useful for everyone along with the great team at Facebook!

A lot of the major adoption successes for OpenID have been in the tech industry, though as of yesterday you can sign in to MySears.com and MyKmart.com using an OpenID. Beyond Interscope Records offering OpenID sign in on artist sites like Snoop Dogg's, Sears is really the first major retailer adopting OpenID. More on the OpenID blog and congrats to the team at JanRain that helped make this happen:

“We’re constantly looking for ways to stay innovative in our online initiatives by identifying and implementing technologies that help our users navigate our communities with ease,” says Rob Harles, Sears’ vice president of community. “Our adoption of the OpenID technology helps simplify our customers’ online experience and ultimately helps us meet our goal of ensuring our customers have the most efficient shopping experience possible.”

I just posted FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social over on the Radar blog:

Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.

Read more...

I have to admit, when bit.ly raised $2 million two months ago I didn't get it and a few others were scratching their heads as well. A month later, I signed up and started using bit.ly and have been addicted ever since! I love games and bit.ly lets me turn my tweets into a game; trying to see how many people I can get to click on something. It's so bad that I tweet less from my iPhone and wait until I can get in front of a web browser to construct a bit.ly URL from my bookmarklet which I can track.

I was never big into social bookmarking, I never really used delicious and only used ma.gnolia mainly to track things which I found interesting. When I log into bit.ly, I now see largely the same thing.



It wouldn't take much for bit.ly to give me a public profile listing recent URLs I've shortened. Ideally they'd show the tweet I used the link in and who else linked to it or wrote about it (which they also already show me). Sounds to me like the main functionality I got out of my ma.gnolia profile.

Might bit.ly go from URL shortening and stats to social bookmarking? Throw in chartbeat too and betaworks has some pretty interesting data.

I just posted Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden over on the Radar blog:

A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user. This is the same model that destroyed AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy's ISP businesses when normal people chose the Internet itself versus their thoughtfully curated walled gardens.

Read more...

Chris Messina and I have been jumping around the country over the past week speaking at FOWA in Miami, TransparencyCamp this weekend in DC and then I spoke at Webstock in New Zealand the week before. All three are absolutely wonderful events and I really want to personally thank the Webstock team and FOWA team for making me feel so welcome! Anyways, Activity Streams is a project started late last year designed to add context to "social feeds" in a very simple way. Martin Atkins has been leading the effort of writing the specifications (Atom Activity Extensions and Atom Activity Base Schema) and we're finally getting to a point where it can be deployed like a beta.

I was using FriendFeed a few days ago and came across an excellent example of why this project is so important. Today, FriendFeed writes custom parsing code for about sixty different services across the social web in order to understand the feeds that each service produces. This means that if I'm using a service that FriendFeed knows about – like Disqus – it works really well. Then again, for services they haven't taken the time to write parsing code for – like TypePad Connect – it doesn't work so well. While I'm certain that FriendFeed could easily write additional code to understand TypePad's feeds, as more social web sites are created it will become increasingly difficult for FriendFeed to keep up with every new service, let alone blogger.



While FriendFeed can certainly keep coding support for new services, it isn't a sustainable proposition for the decentralized nature of the social web. If TypePad published my commenting feeds using Activity Streams markup (which the TypePad team plans to do) and then if FriendFeed parsed the Activity Streams markup, this would have automatically worked! No custom code from FriendFeed and a little bit of extra code for TypePad. Now that's a decentralized social web!

I just posted Anatomy of "Connect" over on the Radar blog:

I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure the list goes on. I'm trying to break down all of these products - ignoring the underlying open or proprietary technologies that make them tick - toward a straw man definition of a "Connect" application:

Read more...

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I'm horrible at replying to email and so you can imagine how much worse I am with paper mail. Back in August, I moved out of my apartment I had been living in for two years and decided that since I was traveling at least eight out of the next ten weeks that it wasn't worth getting a new place immediately. Rather, through the amazing generosity of my friends, found ways to stay on couches or spare beds (it also helps when crucially travels just as much as I do). This of course only made my mail situation worse as I didn't have an easy forwarding address. So, I signed up for Earth Class Mail.




A month and a half later and I was still happy; receiving email telling me I had new paper mail with a scan of the envelope and a web interface where I could choose to open and scan the contents, group together a few pieces of paper mail and ship them to me, shred it, or recycle junk mail.

All of a sudden, I could manage my paper mail via the Internet instead of having huge piles sitting at home which I never touched. This also meant that if I was actually being sent something important and I was out of town, I could see the scanned contents instead of having to wait until I was home. Didn't want to deal with a piece of mail, no problem as it was sitting in their warehouse instead of my living room.

I've been up in Portland the past two weeks for the holidays which coincidentally is where Earth Class Mail is headquartered. A few days, ago their community manager @UncleNate shot me a message asking if I'd be interested in checking out their facility. So yesterday – yes they work on Saturdays too – I drove over to Beaverton to get a tour of their warehouse. It's an old Tektronix building which was originally built not really as a building but rather as a machine. It's full of row after row of shelving that used to have computer controlled robots running on tracks in the ceiling fetching, storing, and moving all sorts of stuff. Today, it's a nondescript security-conscious facility (I couldn't take photos inside) sorting, scanning, storing and shipping a shit ton of mail.

Nate walked me through their process from receiving mail and packages to taking all of the normal sized envelopes and running them through modified mail sorting machines. These machines are like those used by the USPS but also scan the front and apply a unique barcode to each piece of mail. This kicks off a job which sends out emails, like the one above, automatically letting everyone know that they have a new piece of mail. From there, mail is sorted into tubs and stored until more jobs come in to open and scan, ship, shred, or recycle a piece of mail.

They're also proactively looking for mail (by the barcode) that needs something to happen to it every time they're re-running a tub through one of the sorters. This means that if I have a piece of mail in tub 183 which I've asked to be shipped to me and you have a piece in the same tub that you asked to be recycled, when they pull the tub and run it through the sorter to automatically find my piece of mail to ship, the machine will also automatically sort out your piece to be recycled. Everyone in the warehouse is wearing pocket-less coveralls and no cell phones, cameras, etc are allowed and the people opening and scanning mail work in separate locked room.

All in all, a pretty cool operation (with even cooler mail robots coming to their warehouse in the future) and it was great for Nate to see that I was a happy customer, that I grew up in and was visiting Portland, and to proactively reach out to show me just how they took over dealing with the paper mail I love to ignore.

One of the fun projects I've been involved in at work the past few months has been Motion which we're describing as "a new free beta social application for Movable Type." As Anil wrote today in the blog post announcing the public beta:

But the vision of Motion is something we've been working on for a long time, well before we acquired Pownce or before the tech blogosphere started talking about Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect. So, we'd like to outline some of the guiding principles that informed our creation of Motion, as a starting point to the conversation about where social applications in general are headed.

• The biggest social network is the Internet itself.
• Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.
• Reveal the community you already have.
• Your social network belongs under your control.
• Your community should start with half a billion members.
• The web is in Motion.

Basically, Motion brings even more social feature to Movable Type focused on being able to run an interactive community, a social network, that is connected with the rest of the web. This means that the main page of your site is an aggregation of what your members are posting locally (photos, videos, text, links, etc) as well as the actions they're taking around the web (such as their Twitter updates). Profiles then show what a person has been doing and who they're following. Really just all sorts of interesting stuff that's explained even better on the Movable Type Motion beta page.

It's been a fun project since the team hasn't been thinking about how to cram every latest feature from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr or FriendFeed into Motion, but rather around what real community maintainers are wanting to be able to do with this sort of tool. It also follows through on our announcement at Facebook f8 earlier this year where we said that we would ship support for Facebook Connect, but of course we did it Six Apart style and included support for Google's OpenID Provider as well!

Go open web, go!

I had an absolutely great time last month in London speaking at the Future of Web Apps! Chris Messina and I gave a 3-hour tutorial on the "Open Stack" and then I spoke about Blowing Up Social Networks with Open Tech later in the week. Video and slides below along with a quick interview with Simon Mackie from Carsonified.

I've been playing with this for a few weeks, it's really cool to watch Hulu on a giant projector and pull TV shows from my laptop. Gizmodo has a great writeup of how to use Boxee with your Apple TV!

I'm currently in Spain for a bit of vacation with my mom before speaking at a conference here in a few days. Was at FOWA last week in London and had a great time (need to post more on that separately) and the Carsonified crew really know how to put on a great show!

In any case, the seventh? Internet Identity Workshop is coming up in a few weeks in Mountain View. To date there have been over 10 events like this - open space with the agenda made live by the people who are making the identity (relationship) layer happen. Some people say that in some ways the intensity of IIW is like 6 months on a mailing list the whole industry moves forward. So, if you're able to make it to Mountain View November 10th through 12th and are at all interested in online "identity" stuff then you should check it out. http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2008b/register.shtml

The week before last, Joseph Smarr spoke at Web 2.0 Expo in New York about implementing the open web. I was perusing his slides and came across the second to last which was a pretty stark way to compare how Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google are working in the social web space:



It's really exciting though to see some of the largest companies on the net working with the same underlying technology stack! A year ago I doubt we would have expected this let alone things like the Portable Contacts API becoming real.

Just finished creating a slidecast for my presentation from OSCON on the Open Web Foundation with audio from O'Reilly. So check it out if you actually want to hear what I said or download the mp3.

Chatted with the Tom Hughes-Croucher from the Yahoo! Developer Network about the Open Web Foundation and Facebook Connect while up at OSCON last week.

Finally, two-way syncing with Google Calendar and iCal. Woot!

Just got off stage at OSCON Announcing the Open Web Foundation. Really honored to be representing such an awesome group of people and companies who are behind making this happen and are committed to contributing.



Other posts more interesting than mine:

• Scott Kveton


• Dawn Foster


• O'Reilly Radar


• TechCrunch


• ReadWriteWeb (awesome!)

Building a little on my last post, I spoke at f8 earlier today to demo integration of Facebook Connect with Movable Type (made by Six Apart who I work for). You can read more about it on the Six Apart blog, though I wanted to share a photo from Venture Beat's coverage of f8 which I think helps show how all this stuff is starting to get tied together (read the posts if you don't get it). Also cool to see Digg showing OpenID in their new login UI next to Facebook.

Dick Hardt asks the question on his blog if Facebook Connect is a fatal blow to OpenID. I actually think that it helps to show why OpenID is going to become so valuable as you start to invest in your profile(s). To me, it shows that we're now all able to tell the same story and explain to normal people the value of having an identity and profile that can move about them around the web.

Just as no one would let Microsoft own the protocol, no one is going to let Facebook either.

I'm hoping that we'll actually see Facebook move to supporting OpenID for authentication as a building block of Connect, just as MySpace's OpenID implementation allows you to then interact with their Data Availability APIs. It feels like we're in a World where the visions are the same though the bits for API data access are different, but the underlying building blocks (such as OpenID and OAuth) are starting to become standardized across implementations.

More on this later, right now it is 1am and I just got back from my day trip to f8. OSCON again in the morning!

Headed up to Portland this afternoon for OSCON and just put my schedule online if you want to check it out. I won't be there Wednesday as I'll be down at Facebook f8 for the day. Then back up Thursday for a 9:15am keynote on Supporting the Open Web!

Really busy week, with no sleep for me, but should be tons of fun and I look forward to seeing a bunch of awesome people!