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 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.