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 am passionate about openness on the web and its potential to catalyze more meaningful user experiences. It was this passion that brought me to Yahoo! to be a product manager on the Games team, where I was tasked with working to build out our community tools. In November I switched over to the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) team to help Yahoo! create an application platform to open our properties to 3rd party developers. It was an amazing year, and I was fortunate to work with many dedicated and intelligent individuals who were passionate about helping Yahoo! embrace an open strategy. Today I took my next step in my work on creating platforms to help social interactions on the web, but it required a change in scenery.

As of this morning I am an employee of MySpace, working as the Product Manager for the Data Availability project. I strongly believe in the value of having an evolved sense of online identity, one that empowers users by giving them control over their digital self. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the community to create a more open and social web. So keep a look out for what is coming down the pipes from the project, and find me on MySpace at: http://www.myspace.com/pixelelated.