AllThingsD » OpenID

Almost Famous: Chris Messina of Google

Drake Martinet — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:09:08 +0000

In a feature of “Almost Famous” we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging and innovative entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

This week: We took a trip to a little company called Google (GOOG) to talk with Chris Messina, Google’s open Web advocate. Openness? Google? We couldn’t pass this up.

Who: Chris Messina

What: Open Web advocate

Why: Chris has been in early on all kinds of pioneering open Web projects. He helped run Spread Firefox–Mozilla’s community marketing effort–co-founded the BarCamp user-generated un-conferences, and single-handedly invented the Twitter hashtag: #. No joke. He just made the move to the search giant.

Where: Factory Joe (blog); @chrismessina (Twitter); Googleplex (analog place)

Who Else: Open standards are Messina’s forte, but he’s been preaching the gospel of openness to many Google teams.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: You know, I’ve led a pretty padded life, but I guess my worst one was when I was a janitor in a print shop while living in Switzerland. I was living in an attic in this tiny town to attend this Swiss design school–which I didn’t like at all–and this is how I made my meager living while there.

Has a Geek Crush on: I first started learning Web design by reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s book. There are lots, though. More related to the stuff I’m doing now, I think John Panzer is a big unsung hero, he’s the one pushing the Salmon stuff (Google’s open comment project) forward.

Gadget of the Moment: I still love my first-generation Apple (AAPL) iPhone. It doesn’t have 3G and it’s slow as molasses, but I really like the form factor, the metallic finish, everything. It also allows you to take screenshots, which is the one thing really missing from Android.

Biggest Difference Being at Google: Even more email, if you can believe it.

Design Geekiness: My favorite font ever is Pennsylvania by Christian Schwartz. I also like Bello, Flama and Tungsten.

Bio in 140 Characters

Born in New Hampshire, he trained as a communication designer at Carnegie Mellon. He left for California and has been into the open Web ever since.

The Five Questions

What does being an open Web advocate at Google mean? Does it feel like you are working for “The Man”?

Generally what I’m doing here is a lot like what I used to do, actually. I have contact with a lot of different developer teams, and I talk to them about how they can use open standards in their work. Right now though, mostly I’m working on Google Buzz, doing developer relations and helping design the Buzz APIs. We’re trying to create these technologies based on stuff from the grassroots communities where these things already exist, as opposed to inventing our own standards. We document everything on the Google code site and then we just talk about it. It’s a little bit of an evangelism role, in the sense that we have to go out and be a part of the community and be a router for information back into Google.

Big companies seem to have their own agendas and needs to be met, and what I’m realizing now is that a lot of times, they also don’t have time or a way to go out and find the places where these needs are and these tools are already being developed. There are a lot of people who are really hungry for this information, but maybe just didn’t know where to go.

So how do you see Google Buzz as a part of the social Web landscape, now that you’ve been on the inside?

We approached it from a “pieces that are loosely joined” perspective so that we can spit out smaller communities that are self-sufficient, rather than one big monolithic project like Facebook Connect. We built Buzz so that Google can be one place that hosts the underlying technologies, but the capabilities can be spread and used by anyone who wants that social functionality.

The goal is to create a much larger social Web that is dispersed, as opposed to another monolithic silo that sort of sucks in a lot of activity and doesn’t let anything out. Facebook is just the most recent silo, there have been lots in the past. AOL (AOL). Prodigy. A lot of times they don’t mean to be that, but it just happens.

How do you see the competing philosophies of openness and proprietary technology and information at play on the social Web?

I think the way that I look at it is that facilitating choice is actually a good way to ensure you remain competitive. Also, right now, the social Web is in such infancy that competing on what is available now seems so premature. I’d rather see us spend the next five or 10 years building out the social Web so that we have good standards for identity, good standards for authentication and open ways to bring your friends with you to any site on the Web.

Because we’ve never had this social data before, there’s this mentality that it’s solid gold, and we should be hoarding it keeping it from everyone and only letting out little bits. In reality, I think markets work best when there is a flow of data. If I can’t take my data out of one network and move it into another, like I can move credit card balances from one to the other, then I think we are inhibiting the types of things we should be building, which will be much richer.

I already sign into 10 Google products a day with the same account. Is my Google account going to become more like Facebook Connect?

Well, the technology is there, but it’s more a question of motivation. It’s actually a problem I’ve been working on for the last two or three years. The first question is, how do you provide choice to people when they want to log in (what do you ask for)? The other question is, why would they use any one service or other, given the choice?

Facebook has solved that problem by just eliminating the choice. You just choose Facebook Connect, click a button, and it will be fine. And it works pretty well.

A barrier for us is that our tools are built on standards like openID and OAuth that were designed by people who cared a lot more about privacy. As a result of that, a technology based on openID doesn’t automatically come with all the social data that make modern applications work. We are actually working with Facebook on this problem, because it turns out the hardest thing to figure out is just what to put on the user interface–how do you quickly ask people what they’d like to share? We want to avoid making Web sites look like the side of a Nascar.

Google’s push into mobile is based on open standards. How do you see that proliferating??

You know, even the iPhone is actually just a platform that interacts with a bunch of open standards and accepted systems. It relies on 3G, sends email, SMS, takes pictures that are compressed and connects to other devices via Bluetooth–they are all open standards and protocols that have enabled these great tools. I think people are going to want more. I’m intrigued by Android, and it, plus the devices it runs on, are really getting there.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

So Much for OpenID–Google Friend Connect Gets Twitter, Facebook Connect Gets Yahoo

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:01:17 +0000

Ever use Google Friend Connect? No? Every heard of it? No? Well, you may soon.

If you use Twitter.

This morning, Google (GOOG) said it is integrating the microblogging service with Friend Connect, a federated identity platform that allows credentials from social networks to be used on nonsocial sites. So beginning today, you’ll be able log in to any site that supports Google Friend Connect with your Twitter identity, and once you’ve done so, share content from those sites via Twitter (see video below).

An interesting move–more so for timing, than strategy. News of the alliance comes not 24 hours after Yahoo (YHOO) announced the integration of Facebook’s competing identity platform, Facebook Connect, across key properties Mail, News and Finance. Seems Google has no intention of allowing Friend Connect to become for the social Web what Yahoo is to search. Although as Om Malik notes, Google may not have much say in the matter.

“If more and more sites use Facebook Connect, that is use Facebook ID, the closer company gets to becoming the ultimate identity broker of the Web, which in terms helps them achieve their ultimate goal–organize world’s relationships,” Malik writes.

“Since the Yahoo deal will yield more relevant user behavior data,” Malik continues, “Facebook can continue to get better at surfacing information using the social graph. The more Facebook does that, the less important it is for people to continue searching. If the Facebook brain brings you the stuff you’re likely to want (thanks to inputs from your friends), the more Facebook will keep you inside its system. Google is nowhere close to delivering that experience.”

One last point: The announcement of the Google-Twitter and Yahoo-Facebook alliances does not bode well for OpenID, a nonproprietary identity standard that has a lot of industry buy-in but hasn’t yet bee able to move into the mainstream on the Web.

Embrace. Extend …. What Comes Next, Again?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:09:00 +0000

In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): All participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community–determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): Establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community.”

–J Allard, corporate vice president of design and development for the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division, “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet,” 1994

In February, Microsoft (MSFT) surprised industry watchers and embraced the idea of data portability, throwing its support behind OpenID, a decentralized digital-identity protocol.

This morning came the inevitable extension of that idea, the announcement of a partnership with five social networks on a new data-portability strategy. LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo (TWX) and Facebook have all agreed to use Mirosoft’s Windows Live Contacts API to, in the words of John Richards, director of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, “create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services.“

In other words “Windows Live Messenger.” Certainly, it’s hard not to look at Microsoft’s announcement that way, given the simultaneous debut of invite2messenger.net, a new Microsoft Web site through which people can invite friends from participating social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list.

“In completing this two-way street, both Windows Live and our partners have paid special attention to relationship context and privacy management in order to create the best possible user experience,” explains Richards. “We understand that just because people have a friend relationship with a contact on one social network, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want that same relationship on another network. To preserve the context of the relationship, we are requiring that relationships be re-established in each experience with permission from the friend or contact, rather than automatically storing the data. We encourage you to visit www.invite2messenger.net to see these ideas in action, and to invite your Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged friends to join you on the world’s largest instant messaging network, Windows Live Messenger.”

Anything to Complicate the Microsoft Bid, Eh Yahoo?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:25:16 +0000

Google’s (GOOG) “Everybody-But-Facebook Coalition” may soon have a new member: Yahoo (YHOO). The New York Times reports that the company intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that aims to create a set of common APIs that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization.

Queried by the Times, Yahoo offered no further detail on the rumor. “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole,” said a company spokeswoman. “While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”

Anyway, if this particular rumor proves true, it’s potentially big news. As Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li notes, it “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial.”