Paul Lindner

hi5 (RIP) was originally a dating site and Pivoted to a Social Network.

Most profiles fake? I can say for sure that's not true. I maintained Postgres/Memcache/Graph DBs and the write load was real.

That said hi5 did engage in address book scraping and other dark patterns that you'd rather not see these days.

Fun fact: hi5 had a featured photos/profiles section based on popularity. Folks that ended up there deleted their account by 5x or more due to the unwanted attention their 'popular' photos garnered....

So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.

Some little known facts about OpenSocial

- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.

- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.

- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...

- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.

Fun times...

Gave a talk about Perkeep at the Decentralized Web conference this week. Very happy that I was finally able to re-use my "confused developer" slide from OpenSocial in a new way...

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r3hENcuI4E5uR3kFOh4eKAlm91g75sthatOZrgp2c3c/edit?usp=sharing

#googplus

Not strictly "social" per-se, but there were a number of cross overs from iGoogle. Also relevant as Now is undergoing some historical changes of it's own..

- Pixie Labs ended up moving their games to Google+ Games (remember Farmville?)
- The gadget infrastructure from iGoogle (GGS) was used heavily for the +1 button, OpenSocial, PeopleSense and others. +103390686048441232976 might even still carry a pager for this old infrastructure...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XS9u1D-pFSxTcrbTZRa43CV7VKHztHzWLDCzrj0csJ4/edit?_escaped_fragme...

#googplus

#googplus

Paul here from the Superfund Squad, where we're getting rid of the infrastructure you love to hate and paying off unfunded mandates with technical debt. And digging up the History of Google's Social Efforts in the attached collection.

I've been cranking at this social thing for almost 7 years at Google on Google+ and a long time before that at places Six Apart (home of Typepad and Livejournal), hi5 and LinkedIn. I did a lot of work on OpenSocial and other standards back then which is a big reason I'm here today.

Oh and this enterprise thing isn't my first rodeo. Way back at Critical Path we provided hosted email, calendar and tasks for Italian Telecoms, Major Universities *and* the Kiss Army. And at Red Hat we sold shrink wrap and services to all sales channels.

But I'm most proud of the work I did at the UN on telecom standards, relief efforts and publishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 500 languages. (And the site is still standing to this day!)

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx

And finally before that was the Internet Gopher.. Me, with Heavy Metal hair:

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Beyond all this tech I enjoy life in Oakland with my fabulous wife Julie and our Great Pyrenees Gus. You'll find us exploring the parks of the East Bay, checking out obscure music or cruising the rapidly gentrifying Valencia street in the Mission. I'm also heavily interested in building software and systems that last the long term. I'm a member of the Long Now (https://longnow.org) and I have a 20% project called Digital Vellum (http://go/digitalvellum)

Happy to be here with y'all and looking forward to our next adventures!

#googplus

#googplus

Of course I couldn't have done it without the entire teams that wrote the code and these specific products:

Firefox Toolbars
Google Gadgets, iGoogle, and OpenSocial
Hotstuff
Google Buzz and the entire Focus Frontend
Chili
Tacotruck
Mercury
Kraken
... and Oz

And big shout outs to abandoned experiments, never completed features and my agent, Klippy.

https://deletestats.googleplex.com/plindner#1286694000..1474786800!cdd

#googplus

#googplus

*Remove the Kraken!*

https://critique.corp.google.com/#review/134834839

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/opensocial/Kraken?pli=1

#googplus

#googplus

A look to the past to guide us towards the future. This is a candid, level headed, and enjoyable talk about the way we've failed users.

_Harry Halpin and Blaine Cooke go through the history of standards for social networks and identity, and why they failed._

_The Augmented Social Network_ [1] 1995
RDF/FOAF
EmotionML
RSS -> Atom -> ActivityStreams
XRIs
XMPP
OpenID
OAuth
OpenID 2.0
OpenSocial
PubSubHubbub/Salmon
OpenGraph (HTML for Facebook)
ActivityStreams 2.0 (W3C Social)
Blockchains

[1] http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1068

http://redecentralize.org/conf2015/2016/09/07/13-ten-years-of-standards-failure.html

#googplus

#googplus

I don't have my #firstgoogleremail  - but I do have the email that started the ball rolling towards my eventual employment.  Seven weeks later I started at Google.

*Date*: 8/7/10
*Subject*: Interesting moves

_I'm intrigued the recent social moves coming out of Google and wonder if there's some part for me in all of this, either from the inside or from the outside._

_Truth be told, I'm not getting my "change the internet for the better" satisfaction at the moment even with the independent time I spend on Opensocial/Shindig/OAuth._

_Would you like to have a short chat in the next week or two?_

#googplus

#googplus

In Portland?  Tonight you can network with people working on OpenSocial, Shindig and Rave.

Sadly I won't be able to make this or the OpenSocial State of the Union.  Have fun folks!

Originally shared by Mark W.

Please join @ApacheRave, @ApacheShindig, on Tues night @OSCON& celebrate another year of open source! http://bit.ly/NPqiyN

#gplus

Going to OSCON?  Check out this event plus the OpenSocial State of the Union.

Originally shared by Mark W.

#gplus

Couldn't make this one, glad to see the community pushing forward on OpenSocial.

#gplus

Here are my new years thoughts on the social web platforms. I've been pondering what the world can do to get ourselves out of this one man/one graph/one api situation we find ourselves in and what Google can do to help.

Facebook the product and Facebook Connect/APIs have sucked up most of the social web oxygen. Open efforts have largely failed -- the Google-led consortium OpenSocial has been relegated to niche usage like enterprise or contextual gadgets, OpenID use is declining, Webfinger never took off, oEmbed has murky IP, even RSS and Atom are use is declining.

In particular OpenSocial is now paralleling a different OSF -- the _Open Software Foundation_. Remember that? DEC/IBM/etal banded together to fight off a common enemy (Solaris/AT&T or Windows). There was some decent output from it (I loved me some Tru64 OSF/1 Unix) but in the end it was Linux that disrupted and became the server standard while Windows claimed the defacto client standard. Today both OSFs are in decline and don't define the market.
So what to do? Here are a few of my ideas, what about yours?

* Obviously getting market share for Google+ the product and Google+ the platform helps, it provides an alternative. However if we're not careful we end up with a Coke/Pepsi duopoly, since much of our growth will come at the expense of the wider ecosystem before it starts to take from Facebook.

* Try to build on open standards where it sees broad based usage. OAuth 2.0 is something that everyone (including FB) has actually implemented. Activity Streams and schema.org are ascending. Add social to these where it makes sense.

* Try to nurture the next disruptor and be prepared to jump on it when it comes. Any technology that Google promotes as "open" will likely meet the similar fate as OpenSocial. (And I hope schema.org is the exception here...)

* Do something about the Terms of Service encumbered internet that's slowly taking off.

Hopefully sometime in 2012 there can be a way for everyone to work together on social. I hope to live to see the day that Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and a hundeds of smaller players can do something that lifts all our boats and benefits users.

#googplus

#googplus

4 years ago today OpenSocial launched to the world at the first Google Campfire One event.

You can find me at 4:14 and 4:30 operating the browser next to Akash Garg and Jeremiah Robison. Today Akash is doing infra work at Twitter, Jeremiah is over at Jawbone working with a bunch of the former hi5 crew, and I'm working on making Google+ better with some of the same folks that participated in the original OpenSocial effort you see below.

Also don't miss the Vic Gundotra's intro at

Campfire One: Introducing OpenSocial

and performances by Joe Greenstein, Marc Andreessen, Adam Nash and others.

How time flies!

#gplus

Here's the start of the Google+ APIs. Read-only People and Activities

Opensocial folks shouldn't fret -- oauth2, json activity streams and poco all overlap nicely with the ongoing work for OpenSocial V2.

Originally shared by Chris Chabot

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Lao-tzu

I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.

These APIs allow you to retrieve the public profile information and public posts of the Google+ users, and they lay the foundation for us to build on together - Nothing great is ever built in a vacuum so I’m excited to start the conversation about what the Google+ platform should look like.

Please follow the link to the blog post to find out what exactly we’re launching and you can find the technical details on how to use this on our new developer site at http://developers.google.com/+

I’d also like to take a moment to introduce my team who will be joining me on working with our developer community (ie: you!) and answering any questions you may have about the Google+ platform on our discussion forums.

We’ll all also be doing a bunch of Hangouts over the next few days and beyond to talk to you directly and hear what you think of the +Platform as well as helping with any coding questions you may have, so make sure to add them to your Google+ developers circle!

Timothy Jordan

Jonathan Beri

Ade Oshineye

Will Norris

Jenny Murphy

Wolff Dobson

Now let's see lots of re-shares on this post & let's get this party started!

#gplus

OpenSocial is heading to SXSW, but only if you vote for these panels!

Distributed Web Frameworks: The Future of Social

Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10692

Revolution! Open Apps Will Change the Enterprise

Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12817

Building Social Apps for Business Using Opensocial

Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12187

#gplus

Big props to Andrew Davis, Mark W. and the rest of the Opensocial community for getting this done! Major accomplishment.

Originally shared by Evan Prodromou

Voting has started for the new OpenSocial 2.0 specification. If you're not already involved, and you're interested in open apps, this is a great time to get activated. The steps:

1. Sign up here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?key=0Aki8A6bvOtZNcGNXZXY1cUtjMk9DQXhvUjNBYlpjWl... Participation in OpenSocial is free and open to all.

2. When you receive notification that you've been added, vote on this revision: http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-resources/source/detail?r=1520

OpenSocial 2.0 is a huge step forward for the specification, incorporating many of the systems (like ActivityStreams and OAuth) that we use on the modern social web. I'm excited by this push -- let's get it released!

#gplus

Would be interested in getting feedback on this nascent spec from mail.ru. WDYT OpenSocial and Activitystreams folks?

#gplus

Hi Opensocial folks. As you may have noticed that I'm a bit busy lately. Tonight I'm going to catch up on shindig/spec work.

Thanks to everyone in this community for making Opensocial a success!

#gplus

I'm at the San Francisco office today putting the socialism back into Social Standards.

From 1-5pm see talks about OpenSocial and OpenSocial v2.0. It's in Duboce Tech talk.. Then at 5 there's a reception with beer, wine, snaks and *10* vendors demoing OpenSocial apps and containers.

And.... If you want to volunteer to register attendees I can hook you up with a snazzy t-shirt with the v2 logo!

#googplus

Oh fun, this years Opensocial event is going to have a snazzy tee.

#googplus

Hi folks, just a quick note to let you know that we're about to refresh the InApps platform with some new features and fixes. I'm sure Taylor's probably let you know this already, but some things to be aware of:

* isOwner, isViewer in json-rpc requests are not present unless true. This reduces the size of the rpc responses significantly.
* Data-Pipelining and Opensocial templates have much greater functionality.
* content-rewrite feature is available and can be used to consolidate css/javascript in your gadget.

More info to come...

Paul

Battleship running in hi5.

Opensocial Hackathon Results!

#mobile #vox

 At hi5 we've been busy busy busy getting OpenSocial up and running.  We released our developer sandbox, and are rapidly implementing features.  So check out the following URLs

• hi5 OpenSocial developer announcement
• http://sandbox.hi5.com/
• hi5 Platform Development Group

Also, here's a copy of my response to Tim O'Reilly's blog post:

OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid

Hi folks,

Good comments all around. However I'd like to posit that data access is _not_ the problem. We've had universal standards for years now with little uptake. Tribe.net, Typepad, LiveJournal and others have supported FOAF for many, many years, which encompasses the OpenSocial Person and Friends APIs. Not much has come of that -- there isn't a large enough base there to get people interested.

Now you have a broad industry consensus on a single way to provide all of the above plus activity stream data. You have a rich client platform that allows you to crack open that data and use it in interesting ways, and finally you have a common standard for social networks to interact with each other based on the REST api.

So Patrick's statement at the Web 2.0 Expo is correct, a app running inside a container only allows you to see what that container shows you. However that does not mean that a container could not contain friend references to external social networks via it's own federation mechanism. Movable Type 4.0 has shown that you can support any OpenID login in a single system, there's no reason to believe that social networks could not leverage OAuth to do the same.

And here's a final point to consider -- you have Myspace opening up to developers. That's huge. That alone is going to draw more developer attention to this problem than much of the oh-so academic discussions of the past few years.

I suggest people that _want_ OpenSocial to solve all the social graph ills get involved on the API mailing list and make sure that those elements are addressed as OpenSocial evolves.

There's a tremendous amount of momentum. Let's not waste this chance.

#hi5 #opensocial #vox