Surviving (and Thriving in) the Online Identity Wars

OpenID, Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, MySpaceID, Y!OS…it’s hard to keep track of all the recent announcements about online identity and data portability, let alone to make sense of it all and figure out what it means to you. Yet there are enormous opportunities emerging for companies large and small to turbo-charge their services by lowering sign-up friction, gaining access to more data, and virally distributing their users’ activity throughout the Social Web. In this talk, Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo and co-host of TheSocialWeb.tv, will be your guide through this exciting and rapidly evolving new phase of the web, explaining in concrete terms what’s going on and how you can benefit from it today. Being intimately involved with both the major companies and grass-root standards communities, Smarr will draw upon his experiences implementing these technologies in Plaxo, explaining them to mainstream users, and advocating broadly to give users control over their data and open up the social web.