Founder of Excite, then of Jot (Jotspot) .. his focus at Google is on social computing

He’s on the board of EFF

Many people are saying “social is the new black”

People have been fascinated with each other for a very long time.

Most of the popular Web 2.0 applications / platforms have been about people connecting .. that process is now now more efficient, but not new

1. The nature of information discovery is changing … from solitary search, to a social and interactive information discovery … horizontal, word-of-mouth combines with hyperlinks (hypermouth, liplinks ?)

Joe gave us an example of getting a custom cake built for his 6th wedding anniversary, based on a word-of-mouth recommendation that came via him as king a question using Gmail Chat.

Sharing today is (still) done with email .. this is something that today requires “high social activation energy”

2. Separating access (to content) from notification (about content)

“I’m not that self-important” … people realize they are interrupting others, and often don’t want to .. .connection and sharing is becoming more and more passive

3. Social sites to social, web-wide

user-generated content … used to be harder to ‘do”, it’s now becoming “expected” of people on all sorts of sites

As things everywhere become more social, your friends will selectively expose their activity in useful ways

We humans are becoming fragmented on the web … this a question we all ask ourselves is “how do I bring it together, and federate it in useful ways” ?

Or … How can we help sites become social

1. Identity … OpenID
2. Authorization … OAuth
3. Social … OpenSocial

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Google FriendConnect

Bringing friends to every web site .. add OpenSocial capabilities to Web site

People want to publish things from one site to another in order to:

• Discover - find and point to useful information
• Sharing - give and receive
• Social - do what humans have always done - interact