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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
