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.

Last week I was invited to participate on a panel at the most recent DEMO Conference entitled “Social Data Sharing Will Change Lives and Business”.  I had the opportunity to show off some new functionality for the MySpaceID platform that debuted our OpenID/OAuth Hybrid flow in a pop-up as well as our new support for the Activity Streams specification.  It was great to demonstrate how we can build a portable identity platform that both embraces open standards while offering a compelling and elegant user experience.

In addition, other great contributers to the open landscape also presented.  I was joined by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, Kevin Marks of Google, and Dave Morin from Facebook.  Our discussion on stage was moderated by Eric Eldon from VentureBeat.  It was a lively panel that dealt with the current state of openness, the importance of standards, the balance of privacy with sharing, and how we ensure user security.  You can check out the entire panel in the video below.