This is the story of a girl....

Who came all the way from Ohio to work at MySpace. Starry eyed at the thoughts of millions of concurrent users leveraging software she built, she packed her bags and moved across the country in a jiffy. It was not disappointing.

MySpace was filled with color and character. There were many, many faces all over the amazing complex in Beverly Hills. There were crowded corridors filled with pictures of MySpace Secret Shows and meeting rooms with people excited doing collaborative design. This girl and her friends built the Activity Stream at MySpace and soon realized that it was essential for the stream to flow outside the walls for it to stay alive and thus she embarked on a quest to find a sensible way to exchange this valuable information about users at MySpace. In this quest she found new friends and realized that she truly identified with the values that they were fighting for: letting the user be in control, opening up the walled garden and allowing anyone big or small to have the same opportunities by using open standards.

As you may have guessed, that girl, woman actually is me :) And today is my last day at MySpace. I am filled with nostalgia but excited about the future and pursuing my dreams.

You may be surprised since I have been doing a series of conferences. As Group Architect I was able to not only work with the Activity Stream team but also on the Developer Platform with the backing of the COO, I was able to have my ideas heard and executed. It was these projects which provided massive openness of the user’s MySpace data via Open Standards like OpenID, oAuth, ActivityStrea.ms and PubSubHubbub that filled me with joy because of all the possibilities we provided for other people to be creative.

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:
It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

I wish them the best of luck and I am sure we will cross paths and work together.

If everything goes as planned, I will also be working with more of you in the community and helping showcase and build upon one of the most incredible social products I have ever seen.

Yes that is right ! I am happy to announce that I have decided to join Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager.

I will be working closely with David Recordon, Luke Shepard and another fantastic group of people.

This is going to be a great year. Get ready !

MySpace Developer Contest

Our apis are so easy and I have a couple ideas for cool apps but:

http://www.myspace.com/developerchallenge says:

>>Employees of Sponsor, their advertising or promotion agencies, those involved in the production, development, implementation or handling of this Contest, any agents acting for, or on behalf of the above entities, their respective parent companies, officers, directors, subsidiaries, affiliates, licensees, service providers, prize suppliers and fulfillment companies, and any other person or entity associated with this Contest (collectively, the " Contest Entities") are ineligible to enter or win this Contest. Household Members and Immediate Family Members of such individuals are also not eligible to enter or win. "Household Members" shall mean those people who share the same residence at least three months a year. "Immediate Family Members" shall mean parents, step-parents, legal guardians, children, step-children, siblings, step-siblings, or spouses. Contest void where prohibited.
Sadnesss ! I could really use the 10K !

If anyone is trying to get a head start on this:
http://www.myspace.com/developerchallenge
And has questions go to: http://groups.google.com/group/myspace-apis

Answering the real time flow questions before the SuperNova panel

#sn09: We are moving from a Web of pages and sites to a rich continuous stream of online interactions.

@ciberch: Yes our online world is modeling closer the physical world which is immense and filled with streams of events upon events (acontecimientos)

#sn09:This new model snuck on us though social networks and micro blogging, but it is quickly becoming an aspect of the online experience.

@ciberch: The reason why it came from social networking is by no means a surprise. These websites were made to allow the user to be social. Its impossible to be social without introducing yourself . Sites like MySpace allow users to create an online identity and present their virtual face to the world.

User: I like to have a social circle of people to interact with on a variety of topics.

User: You may be far but here is my picture, my name, my overall likes/dislikes

Well in real life the users are not sitting still waiting for visitors to stop by. They are not sitting there repeating the same information over and over. That’s how social networks started…. We know that after the second visit to someone's profile the only thing the visitor cares about is what changed

The need to convey news came from users as a reflection of their lives via blogs, bulletin boards, forums, journals even just changing your picture, theme or display name.

Streams: Close the divide of space but also time

User: I don't really want to go bother everyone right now to tell them what happened but it would be great if they can see this later and let me know what they think.

Lifestream is the new identity: What a user does, how others react

The opinion of someone you trust on a certain topic is the most valuable

One to many disconnected chat

#sn09: How will the flow model alter the business landscape and user expectations ?

@ciberch: When users interact with businesses, they know the businesses have ulterior motives: make money

Users need things from businesses. Adding a social layer to a business will help the user realize the value of the businesses' offering. Adding streams (ratings/reviews) also helps businesses provide the identity/value of a product. Similar to the lifestream for a thing. Also on the reverse businesses will look at individuals public lifestream to reflect the person's character and potentially make some decisions based on that.

Therefore, it is important to be able to exchange these streams. Users don't do everything in one site, the same way as users don't just go to one store or eat one restaurant or live in one town for the rest of their lives.

We still are living in the midst of the information age. Information and knowledge inevitably equates to better decisions: better responses and better communication.

Humans are social by nature and empowering them with the information to make their social interactions more precise is very valuable.

Another aspect of humans is the desire to self express and contribute thus asserting their value. With this goal in mind many of us have spent hours and hours building personal web sites, blogs, taking pictures, videos, writing songs. They want to be discovered and places like MySpace with the stream allow for this happen.

Finally another aspect of humans is their competitive spirit and desire to surpass others in some particular areas. To be recognized as creative minds or reputable curators of content and share important information

The availability of information levels the playing field and builds meritocracies. Anyone can learn, analyze, comment

Shared development, collective intelligence. On demand indexing and correlating

It is the only way we can process this mass of information, conquer it together and evolve

What actually happened was here:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2695517

Expense Training Lesson

So I have about 3 months of expenses to be reimbursed by work. Most of them are taxi receipts from SFO to work and to different meetups. I have been told I need to attend a lesson to finish submitting my expenses.
I am sitting here listening to the Oracle expert tell me I need to use IE for the best experience on their new finance tool. Funny to hear companies are still so into IE
IGN guy is annoyed the lesson is MySpace specific. I am now done eating Meghan's delicious pumpkin cake and tapping my leg wanting to leave.
No single sign on -- lame

Sf vs LA

I am contemplating moving SF soon so I can be in the same city as @n2frizbee and be able to properly plan our wedding and the rest of our lives.

The only problem is that i have made so many friends here in LA and at MySpace that its really hard to think of not seeing them again.

Even through the harder times when everyone is bitching we find ways to laugh it off and pull through it.

I guess LA is more of a city for single beautiful people. SF is a city for smart friends and more family values.

It would be so cool if I could take my sister Mary with me.

Cerebral Snapshot

Left

1. Man on Southwest Flight 3149 from LAS to LAX: I repeat you cannot save seats. Much less 6 seats with a full plane !
2. Taxi drivers are really nice when the economy is shit. Today one offered be complimentary bottled water... (I didnt accept it but gave him an extra buck)
3. Vegas is the best quit smoking plan -- cough cough -- so that's where all the smokers went
4. Damn I accidentally bought an Ed Hardy shirt....
5. Eating Healthy Choice Tortilla soup when temperature im my apt > 85F is a bad idea

Right

1. The only way to scale is to be redundant.
2. Semantics are king
3. Progressive enhancement means Microformats and ActivityStrea.ms
4. You must inject the microformats server side
5. Don't bother exposing an API full of GETs

OpenID Registrars

Recently I saw Mr. Messina's mocks for teaching the user what an OpenID is and how to get one or use an existing one. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/3841182425/

I feel that this is still complicated for a regular end user. They just want to log in or signup for the new service as fast as possible.
The open id relying party should be able to just show the user their openids with the last one they used selected so the end user does not even have to bother typing anything if they don't want to.

I would like to propose a potential solution to this. When a provider creates an openid for a user they register it with an "OpenId Registrar". The OpenID registrar will cookie the user.


An OpenId Registrar keeps track of all the identities a user has. It will have APIs similar to the Social Graph Apis from Google. Given one OpenID from a given provider you can get the rest. This can also be supported via webfinger. Given an email address give me all the openids for the person. And with the help of the cookie it can say give me what openid provider I should present to this user.

So the way in which having an OpenID registrar would solve the NASCAR issue is that it will provide an API which returns the list of OpenIDs for the user on that browser and the last one used. Which means the registrar should also have an endpoint which can be invoked to store which provider was just used.

Fairly simple but should address end user confusion.

What do you think ?