In Context

I can’t think of a better way to kick of a new blog than to post about this weekend’s data sharing summit. There were folks from big sites like AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as well as lots of small cool sites Pownce, RapLeaf, and lots more. Though Marc had planned it for a while, the buzz just before the meeting around Brad’s thoughts on the social graph couldn’t have come at a better time. Facilitated in open space by Kaliya, who as usual did a wonderful job, the meeting was a chance to kick around a topic that I’ve been passionate about for years. The original question I asked myself in 2003 was, how could I merge the social sub-graphs of which I was a member into one unified graph so I could see it all in one place? So I couldn’t have been more excited to go, and I wasn’t disappointed.

For my colleagues Drummond and Markus Sabadello and I who attended with me it was a chance to:

1. Launch a new community site, cloudtripper.org, focused on this area
2. Demo some code that we’ll post to cloudtripper.org (as soon as we get SVN up!) that showed how we can access using a common API data from both Facebook and an OpenID OP service.
3. Demo the new Community Dictionary Service (CDS) that we’ve put up as a live (though experimental) service at http://cds.idschemas.idcommons.net