Max Engel - the 8BitKid
living bit by bit

Last week was my last week on the road, at least for a while (hopefully). I was at the Internet Identity Workshop and the OpenSocial 1-year birthday party. IIW is like a really intense and productive summer camp for folks in the internet identity space. The OpenSocial event gave the containers and app developers a chance to celebrate the successes of the past year and go over what’s coming down the road.

I wanted to share some of the videos from the week. This was my first guest appearance on “thesocialweb.tv“, where I discussed my work at MySpace on Data Availability.

Next up is Joseph Smarr from Plaxo giving a talk on the Open Stack and the social web. Part of his presentation included a demo of the new Portable Contacts spec and how you can access MySpace info through the Data Availability platform. The video doesn’t do the audio justice ;-)

Joseph Smarr on Portable Contacts at IIW from max engel on Vimeo.

Here are the slides from my talk at Widget Summit 2008, and you should also check out John McCrea’s live-blog off my presentation.  I’m off to the Internet Identity Workshop next week, and will also be holding a session at the OpenSocial 1-year anniversary event on “busting out of the container”, which will cover leveraging the REST layer for external application development.

Today Google announced a single sign-on solution that is powered by OpenID. This is certainly a fantastic bit of news, and comes on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement of their intention to support the standard. In addition, Chris Messina wrote an excellent post yesterday on how we can overcome the usability problems that have marred OpenID to help the spec succeed, and how e-mail address support is critical to the success of the standard.

I completely agree on the importance of enabling e-mails as a valid OpenID, and believe that we should ultimately empower the user to enable the identifier he or she most strongly identifies with. At MySpace, we are uniquely positioned to work with OpenID because we have a user-base that already thinks of themselves as being represented by a URL. If you ask any MySpace user what their vanity URL is, there is a very good chance they’ll know it. However, beyond us and the blogging community, most users from major OP’s don’t know what their URL is, even if many of them actually already possess an OpenID. That is why, even with the excitement around Microsoft becoming an OP, a user with a valid OpenID doesn’t equal a user leveraging their OpenID. It is this disconnect that e-mail-based OpenID can help to alleviate. Further, we need to be flexible enough to include other identifiers that might emerge, such as cell phone numbers.

It is this eventual freedom to use the identifier you identify with as your OpenID that necessitates that the foundation take a more proactive role in marketing. It is only once the brand has been strengthened that users will understand that their URL, e-mail, or type foo identifier is something special. people know they have a credit card number, and they know who gives it to them, even if they aren’t being expressly asked for their “Visa” or “Mastercard”. we need that type of recognition.

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Yesterday I attended the SNAP Summit, and gave a talk on the emergence of the open stack and identity platforms.

So the next couple of weeks are going to be pulling me north as I voyage out to chat about the open web at a variety of venues:

10/28: SNAP Summit
11/3 - 11/4: Widget Summit
11/10 - 11/12: Internet Identity Workshop
11/13: OpenSocial 1-year Anniversary

So if you happen to be in the bay during any of these times, definitely drop me a line, and if you make it to one of these events, please say hi or come introduce yourself. After last week’s OpenID UX Summit, this is shaping up to be a very exciting span of several weeks for those of us who work on web identity.