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FactoryCity

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Clarifying my comments on Twitter’s annotationsJune 21

Two weeks ago, Mathew Ingram from GigaOM pinged me via my Google Profile to ask what my thoughts — as an open web advocate — are on Twitter’s new annotations feature. He ended up posted portions of my response yesterday in a post titled “Twitter Annotations Are Coming — What Do They Mean For Twitter and the Web?”

The portion with my comments reads:

But Google open advocate Chris Messina warns that if Twitter doesn’t handle the new feature properly, it could become a free-for-all of competing standards and markups. “I find them very intriguing,” he said of Annotations, but added: “It could get pretty hairy with lots of non-interoperable approaches,” a concern that others have raised as well. For example, if more than one company wants to support payments through Annotations but they all use proprietary ways of doing that, “getting Twitter clients and apps to actually make sense of that data will be very slow going indeed,” said Messina. However, the Google staffer said he was encouraged by the fact that Twitter was looking

Social media versus Oil Can Henry’sJune 13

It’s the banal that determines whether social media will succeed in the mainstream, and today I had an experience that I think demonstrates how far away we are from achieving the the ubiquitously useful social media experience we deserve.

Specifically, I got my oil changed.

The epitome of banal, right?

Yeah, except, see, I don’t really know anything about cars (yeah, I’m man enough to admit it… what? What?!), — and so when the Oil Can Henry’s technician suggested that I use synthetic motor oil instead of the conventional stuff I’d been using, I had no idea what to tell him — though the significant price difference definitely put me off.

Pressed for an answer, I did what anyone in this situation would do (yeah right): I posted to Twitter and CC’d Aardvark (a question-answer service that follows my tweets):

My first five months at Google, by the numbersJune 9

Clarification: The first version of the post talked about my first six months at Google. Apparently my math skills haven’t improved since I took the job, however, as there are actually only five months between June and January. I regret the error.

Today marks six five months since I joined Google on my birthday on January 7. It’s been an interesting, busy time for me.

Having never worked for a big company (where I define “big” as having more than 100 employees), working for Google is a lot like moving from the suburbs into a big city — I’m just constantly meeting new people and finding out about stuff I had no idea was going on.

Still, to put things in perspective, Google only has about 20,000 employees, whereas, Microsoft has nearly 100,000 and HP has a whopping 300,000. Those numbers boggle my mind, but are useful to keep in mind when Googlers call their employer a “startup”, unironically.

Speaking of big numbers, Eric Schmidt threw some big numbers around recently about the amount of data being created relative today to the s

Two tastes better together: Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID ConnectMay 17

On Friday, David Recordon, one of the original authors of OpenID, released a single-page specification for OpenID Connect, a concept that I outlined on this blog in January before I joined Google.

I’m particularly excited about this early proposal because it builds on all the great progress that the community has made recently on a litany of technologies, including OAuth 2.0 and the link-based resource descriptor format (LRDD) and its emerging JSON-based variant (JRD).

But I’m most excited about OpenID Connect because it forces the OpenID community to evaluate the progress we’ve made over the last three years (OpenID 2.0 was i

Two interviews on the open web from SXSWMay 3

You must have an HTML5-capable browser to watch this video. You may also download this video directly.

Funny how timing works out, but two interviews that I gave in March at SXSW have just been released.

The first — an interview with Abby Johnson for WebProNews — was recorded after my ActivityStreams talk and is embedded above. If you have trouble with the embedded video, you can download it directly. I discuss ActivityStreams, the open web and the role of the Open Web Foundation in providing a legal framework for developing interoperable web technologies. I also explain the historical background of FactoryCity.

In the