I’m happy to introduce the first video for the new startup I’m a part of: Gravity.com.  We’re building a site that allows people to come together and discover people and discussions that match their interests so they can engage in discussion.  We’re currently in private beta, but if you’re interested, please sign up to request an invitation.  This video is a fun way of showing what we’re about.  Enjoy!

I know I’ve been off of the radar since I left MySpace, and I’m happy to finally be able to talk about my newest project: gravity.com.  We’re officially out of stealth now, and it is a great feeling to be able to now talk about something I have been pouring my heart and soul into over the past six months.  We’ve assembled an amazing team here, and today we’re unveiling the site and the problem we are tackling.

The online conversation space has been historically undeserved, with outdated tools that create fragmented and unwieldy discussions.  Our mission is to help people engage in meaningful conversations about their passions.  Be it gadgets, cooking, Voltron, or whatever you may fancy, Gravity will provide users with a place to have discourse with other people who share their interests.  Traditional tools like forums, group email lists, and collaborative blogs haven’t offered users with simple, functional, and fun way to interact and share.  When we talk about what we’ve built, we like to describe it as a turn-based conversation site.  This isn’t about allowing for chatter, but instead about creating a destination where we provide a framework for people to better share and communicate.  We’re focused on building out the Interest Graph for the web to help people connect with their passions and discover people and topics that are personally relevant.  Additionally, we’re embracing the distributed nature of the web, current movements in open API’s and technology, and are looking at how we open up our technology while inter-operating with others.

Please check out this TechCrunch post that delves into more detail on the company and our mission, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at: @gravity.  This is an exciting moment for me personally and professionally, and I can’t wait to share more about the project, and more importantly, give everyone a chance to play with the product and tell me what you think.

Today Google announced their new Chrome OS, which is an operating system optimized for always-connected netbooks.  The OS focuses on users who already leverage web-based applications, and forgoes any native software for leveraging HTML5 and the Cloud.  While certainly an interesting concept, the OS seems more geared towards casual users who already use Google apps and don’t need to perform serious tasks offline (although Google Gears could help with this).  The OS boasts syncing with the cloud and robust security, and also boots incredibly quickly.

I spent the time to build the Chromium OS, which is the developer build.  While it was a time-consuming process, it was fairly straightforward, and instructions can be found here.  This initial build doesn’t give you much to play with, but considering that the OS isn’t planned for launch until a year from now, they have plenty of time to build this promising project into something more exciting.  Once you play around, you immediately see that Google really is cutting out the application layer to connect the browser to the kernel, and anyone who has played with Chrome will feel right at home.  Additionally, the fact that the entire OS leverages web standards, it will be interesting to see how this could help evolve various open standards initiatives.

For some  videos that explain the OS, check out the official YouTube page for the project here.

I began at MySpace almost a year ago today as a product manager on the Platform team. While MySpace had launched the Data Availability project just before I joined, I was there to help formulate our plan and define its evolution. To me, the key was to offer a standards-based identity platform.  MySpaceID is the realization of that goal.

I’m very proud of what our team accomplished over the past year. We deployed a distributed identity platform that not only provides an open ecosystem for developers that want to integrate their sites or services with MySpace, but did it in a way that maintains our commitment to open standards. MySpaceID successfully launched support for OAuth, became an OpenID provider, offered the OpenID/OAuth Hybrid experience in a pop-up, and built our API offerings on top of Portable Contacts, OpenSocial, and Activity Streams. Not only did our team successfully implement these protocols, but helped contribute back to the community.

People often don’t fully appreciate how much cooperation takes places between companies, because we are painted as being in opposition and in an arms race to own the social web. However, the past year was an unprecedented time of collaboration. It demonstrated that we can collectively contribute to helping make the web a better and easier to use experience for all of our users. We made great progress at the Internet Identity Workshop, both OpenID Usability Summits, countless meet-ups, and more.

But now the time has come for me to move on. While MySpace presented opportunities through their scale and reach, I’ve spent the past 3 years at large companies, and now I’m ready to go small and give the startup life a try. There is certainly a lot of uncertainty with this transition, but I’m looking forward to a break from e-mailing, conference calls, and all the rest. I’m trading all that in for the chance to help build something from the ground up. I can’t say much now about what’s next, but I promise to say more about what I’m up to as soon as I can. Thanks to all of the many fantastic people I’ve had the chance to work with inside of our company and out, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate with everyone as we strive to make the web a more open and social place.

I know I’ve been neglecting the blog, but I’ve been busy with work and play. I promise to post about some of my fun travels, interesting discoveries, and such soon. In the meantime, enjoy this video which explains the platform I spend my days working on: MySpaceID.