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Yes friends, I’m turning 29 and I’ve decided to go work for The Man.

In all actuality, I’ve been mulling over such a move for some time, considering a number of compelling opportunities for my next step. After reviewing my options — in light of the progress I’ve made so far and my familiarity and existing relationships with the new team at Google that I’ll be working with — I came to the conclusion that Google offers me the best possible opportunity to continue my work in an environment and culture that is compatible with my outlook, goals, and work habits.

I was trained as a designer, but I’ve been involved with the tech scene since I arrived in Silicon Valley just over five years ago. In some ways, technology has reshaped the way I approach and solve problems — forcing me to think in terms of adoption strategies first, rather than always trying to find the simplest, cleanest design, because of the disadvantaged position I occupied as a non-coder. I can see the consequences of these effects on my approaches first to OAuth, and then to Activity Streams, as well as with OpenID, with positive and negative results. In some ways I’ve had to temper my designer training and put technology first in order to grow an audience. But now I’m ready for new challenges that will expand my ideas and tactics, force me to attack problems from new perspectives, and dip into my design thinking repertoire to operate at a whole new level.

Though I consistently aim high, I want more success in turning my ideas into tangible outcomes, and in doing so, prove the power that I see in open, interoperable standards that can make the web a richer and more intricately spun space.

In some ways, I’m still just getting started with my work.  In joining Google, I see the chance to have a greater impact than I might otherwise on my own. That said, I won’t lose track of what intrinsically motivates me — that I’ve always been about spreading the benefits of the web by creating technology that  fosters innovation and choice. And there’s where I see alignment with what I’ve been doing, and what Google needs to succeed. In fact, my new title at Google? The same one I independently gave myself a year ago: “Open Web Advocate”.

In this role, I’ll still be an active community board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations; I hope to help push the Activity Streams project forward with a 1.0 release of the spec soon. And I’m still hopeful about the future of my semi-neglected and half dormant Diso Project! I’ll also soon be publishing the results of my collaboration with Mozilla Labs, which will provide some insight into what social networking in the browser might look like, and how OpenID Connect might play a role in it.

For good measure, I should also point out that my good friend and colleague Joseph Smarr also made a similar decision recently  — unbeknownst to me at the time! —  and announced that he’ll be joining Google later this month as well.

So, net-net, I’m stoked to be joining The Man Google, and very thankful to have had as much support from the many, many people with whom I’ve connected through the synapses of the social web over these past several years. This is of course a very happy birthday present for me, and I’m eagerly anticipating what’s next for the open social web in 2010…! This can all still be made better. Ready? Begin.

Feel free to leave a comment here, or get in touch via email.

Ma.gnolia’s not the first to move to OpenID-only signups, but perhaps one of the first to remove the ability to create new Ma.gnolia-only accounts in favor of the alternative.

If you previously created a Ma.gnolia account you can still sign in with your email address or username and password, but new accounts must be generated using remote credentials from services like Facebook or Yahoo!, or with any OpenID.

This approach offers a couple benefits as well as drawbacks. It’s important to think through these issues from a number of perspectives (users, community, developers and site owners/maintainers) and to think about what this might mean for similarly narrow applications in the future (Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site and, like Twitter, does one thing pretty well and sports a number of capable APIs for extending the service).

Users

For existing Ma.gnolia users, not much has changed besides the sign in experience. Once you’ve set your default sign in interface (i.e. OpenID, Yahoo!, Facebook, old skool Ma.gnolia, etc), you shouldn’t need to worry about this choice again, unless you clear your cookies or use a new computer. Once signed in, you use Ma.gnolia as you always would.

The difference comes for new users signing in for the first time. Rather than going through that old dance of providing an email address, waiting for the confirmation, clicking through the confirmation link, filling in your profile, uploading an avatar, blah blah blah, you simply click a button or enter your OpenID URL, confirm your account on your identity provider, return to Ma.gnolia and you’re set. Depending on how you’ve setup your remote account, Ma.gnolia could import your avatar, your name, your email address and other demographic details, which you can customize later, all in one fell swoop.

Now the big question of course is: what happens if someone comes to Ma.gnolia to sign up and doesn’t have a remote account or doesn’t want to use one of their existing accounts?

On the first point, with Yahoo’s adoption of OpenID earlier this year, and AOL, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and Flickr (among others), we have pretty good coverage for most people. Add Facebook accounts into the mix, and for most of the folks who will be signing up for Ma.gnolia, they’ll probably have another account hosted elsewhere that they can reuse. And, signing up for a new OpenID account elsewhere, at sites like ClickPass, Vidoop or MyOpenID, is barely less convenient than the old process for creating a new Ma.gnolia account (and, the process for obtaining an OpenID will probably get consistently easier over time anyway).

But, what if you don’t want to use an existing account, either because you’re worried about associating your other online activities with your bookmarks, or you prefer to keep facets of your identity separate in different contexts? Well, there are two answers here: 1) too bad because, well, Ma.gnolia doesn’t really “need” new signups (more on this later), and besides, it turns out that most of Ma.gnolia’s OpenID users to date (sure, the early adopters) have shown higher engagement and therefore represent higher value to the overall community; and 2) not too bad if you use ClickPass, Yahoo! or another identity provider that supports directed identity — a feature that essentially assigns a unique OpenID URL for each new service that you signup for, keeping your online activities discreet unless or until you choose to unify them.

Community

The benefit to the community here is somewhat speculative, but I can say that there is increasing value in knowing if user_x on one system is the same user_x on another system, and not just due to an accidental (or intentional) name collision. Since Ma.gnolia will now have a verified identity URL for each of its members, it will be conceivably easier to evaluate whether the factoryjoe you’ve stumbled upon is me or not, since I’m the only person who can sign in against factoryjoe.com, my OpenID URL.

This has benefits for the existing group functionality and for contact lists in Ma.gnolia, so that, as you begin to grow an external contact list of URLs for people, Ma.gnolia could watch your list and then alert you when new friends show up and start participating on Ma.gnolia, along the lines of the feature that Dopplr just released and that Facebook has begun offering.

Once Ma.gnolia is able to identify its users from external networks, implicit reputation will emerge in the minds of users who can recognize their friends from other networks. Again, if I’ve identified myself to Ma.gnolia as factoryjoe.com, anyone who uses OpenID on their blog and has seen me leave a comment with my OpenID will have a pretext for interacting with and connecting to me. As it is today, it’s completely hit or miss whether I’ll remember or recognize someone on Ma.gnolia unless they use the same avatar that they use in other social networking contexts — and while that heuristic works most of the time, it’s certainly not trustworthy, given that anyone can upload anyone else’s avatar.

Developers and Site Owners/Maintainers

This last group has somewhat less to do with Ma.gnolia specifically, but, should this trend towards accepting remote credentials exclusively take off, not only will we see increasing value in picking a solid identity provider, but we’ll also see an easier situation for developers and site owners and maintainers who will be able to ostensibly outsource the account management duties of a site. While a drawback is that users may be locked out of their accounts should their identity provider go down (hence the importance of choosing wisely and designing sites defensively!), the major upside is that all the annoying and redundant stuff around building user login pages, error handling, password retrieval and recovery will become the duty of third parties.

To put this in perspective, think of credit cards (my favorite analogy for OpenID): as much as it sucks, when your credit card is declined, it’s not up to the store owner to sort out what went wrong: it’s between you and your bank. The store owner is off the hook. Sure, he can be helpful and forgiving and offer to take another form of credential or point you to an ATM, but ultimately, you’re going to need to resolve the issue on your own. Considering the time that Larry and Todd put in supporting the Ma.gnolia community (two people for over 100,000 members!), they really should be focusing on core issues with the service and improving the basic functionality and performance rather than dealing with trivial account matters that really don’t have much to do with Ma.gnolia’s core offerings.

But that’s just looking at legitimate users — i.e. “real” people.

The far more troubling trend on Ma.gnolia has been the rise of spammers of various ilk, using the site for misguided SEO scams that burden the overall system. You could argue that fighting spammers alone would be enough to warrant the switch to OpenID-only account provisioning if it weren’t for the additional merits I’ve already mentioned (and according to Larry, it looks like this change has already paid off with a considerable drop in spammer activity on the site).

The beauty of relying on URL-based accounts is that other people with a far greater interest in “owning identity” (that is, big services like Yahoo! and Facebook or individuals operating their own blogs or identity providers) is that other, more capable and focused systems are tasked with weeding out the bad actors. And, depending on how you decide to implement this approach, you can choose to trust certain identity providers more than others, just as border patrol does for passports of different origin today. Sure, there will continue to be value and legitimacy in anonymity or pseudonymity in social networking contexts, but using remote identities doesn’t actually affect that. It just means that you have to find the appropriate host that will offer you directed identity. All the same terms of use apply, as well ss the terms of the remote system (therefore, anyone who signs in to your site using a Yahoo! OpenID will have already agreed to the Yahoo! terms of service barring abuse and illegal activities).

From a developer perspective, it will also get easier to support this approach as libraries to handle remote account provisioning and delegated authorization (using OAuth) will proliferate. Ideally it will lead to more innovation and more experimentation and more qualified signups for services when user sign-in is outsourced, just like server hosting is now handled by S3 and computation is handled by Amazon’s EC2 (etc.).

It’s not that Ma.gnolia’s abandonment of new native accounts is that much of a revelation, but it does offer the chance to reconsider how taken-for-granted account creation and instantiation has become. I know that Leslie Chicoine of Satisfaction has been thinking about latent registration where users are exposed to the value of the site before being forced down the sign up rabbit hole. Migrating to remote accounts is just one more way of lowering the barrier to demonstrating your core value and engaging new users immediately. It’ll be very interesting to watch the response on Ma.gnolia and to see whether, in reducing the number of spammers on the site, it also has the unintended effect of reducing new signups by real people. Somehow I doubt it, especially if it gets easier to incorporate Ma.gnolia as a service in remote applications like Facebook and OpenSocial containers.

I started off this morning with a partially composed blog post in mind owing to my reaction to a lengthy conversation I had yesterday (tweeted for reference). For whatever reason it took me all day to sit down to tackle it, but perhaps I needed the day to stew over it in the back of my mind.

The basic premise is this: cleverness is a huge asset when applied to constraint-based technological innovation and is probably the most necessary attribute that someone can bring to your organization today.

Only the truly clever will avoid unnecessary reinvention at all costs to the point that, to the lay observer, this individual may seem like a downright lazy corner-cutter. Instead, cleverness is a honed skill that takes time, dedication and above all, a commitment to cultivate an appreciation for not only doing the least amount of work possible, but also the ability to pick the least amount of work possible that will also afford the most leverage in actually solving the problem.

This is not trivial stuff either, and I’ll tell you why in a bit.

First, I’ll identify 37 Signals‘s Jason Fried and Flickr’s Cal Henderson as my inspiration for this line of thinking. Conversations with both of these guys has taught me a lot about the value of cleverness and its relevance in each their respective successes. These guys are ruthless; whenever I’m stuck hemming and hawing between potentialities, I always ask myself, man, if I pinged Jason or Cal right now and asked what I should do, what would he say?

Well, after doing just that countless times, I’m pretty confidant, especially after yesterday’s exchange, that I can now serve myself. I’ve started to use what I’ll call the law of minimal reinvention. Or, to contradict myself and invent something new, maybe I’ll call it the The Fried Henderson Law.

The Fried Henderson is an approach to problem solving rooted in erudition, experience and a love of World of Warcraft. The trick is in seeing the opportunity space clearly, adding the right constraints (as many as possible), and then avoiding reinvention at all costs. More often than not, it’s triangulating a solution: what’s the shortest distance between where we are now and getting to the pub afterwards to celebrate our success? Or, to put it into Fried Henderson terms, what’s the least amount of work that I can do to satisfactorily solve this problem so I can get back to World of Warcraft?

Well, clearly, if you’re going to not only get back to WoW but avoid additional interruptions, you’re going to need to document your work. And, if you’re writing your own documentation, as the 37 Signals guys do — constantly — you’ll quickly realize the benefit of creating small and simple isolated solutions that can be reused as components over and over again, playing along with Tantek’s Building Blocks model. Better yet, the most clever folks will resort to using existing applications and solutions built, maintained — and documented — by others, and — provided the licensing rights check out — will use the solutions of other similarly clever folks over needlessly wasting effort reinventing a redundant solution.

Given the current state of the web, web services and the “mashup-cum-widget economy”, this is crucial and absolutely necessary to consider when hiring today. You don’t need someone who feels compelled to prove him or herself by reinventing yet another AJAX framework; the candidate who searches Google for an existing implementation with documentation is the one you hire. This is the candidate that you want, the one that is resourceful, can get things done typically under or near budget and with probably fewer resources and less time than an equally qualified but overly inventive individual. To make it catch-phrasey, you want someone who essentially subscribes to the Friend Henderson dictum.

So. For completeness I should point out that sometimes it’s okay to invent something again. Or to solve a problem in a novel or more effective way given changes in the environment, attitudes or opportunity space (broadband, reduced importance of privacy, launch of the iPhone, etc.). There are also a large number of uninvented solutions out there (namely the ones that haven’t been invented yet, in case my language yoo confooze) — for example, solving the cross-domain social networking problem (though some folks are working on it *ahem*). Or fixing drag and drop upload in the browser. Or getting people into the browser too. Etc etc.

The point isn’t to not be creative but instead to be clever, in a do-as-little-as-necessary way. There are so many great tools and technologies out there today with so little of their full potential discovered or exposed (I mean, had you thought of using Google Maps for viewing panoramas?! Neither had I!) that it’s silly to consider reinventing existing infrastructure when others have already done your work for you!

Do as Jon Hicks says and be a creative sponge for sure, but also following the rule of Fried-Henderson and be clever in what you endeavor to create! If someone has already bothered to create a better solution and to support it, for shuck’s sake, use it!

Trying to map natural phenomena to the digital…

“Rain.”

Does it ever rain online? Y’know, not so much like “water” or “precipitation” but the phenomenon of “moisture” condensing, rising up into the atmosphere, and then returning to the surface to distribute nutrients, replenish the environment, to wash away the residue of life unfolding.

….

What I’m also wondering about are those bottom-dwellers… like the sucker fish at the bottom of fish tanks in Chinese restaurants… do they exist online? …as part of the positive ecosystem — not like viruses or pests like spammers, but creatures that perform maintenance on the conditions of the environment.

And the two classes are: natural occurring phenomena and voluntary maintenance actors.

So I’m just wondering about this.. that’s all.

Finally, no more Sourceforge nonsense… Monolingual 1.3.7 has added support for Sparkle!

Combined with AppZapper and Xslimmer, Monolingual is a great way to keep your system light and free from superfluous language files that can take up hundreds of megabytes…

What I’d really like to see, though, is these three apps get together to come up with a blacklist feature to protect sensitive apps that don’t like to be messed with. I know that Xslimmer is doing something like this — now to get AppZapper and Monolingual to sign on!

“We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: ‘Will it work with my iPod?,” he said. “We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware.”

Who said it? None other than Cathedral and Bazaar author Eric Raymond. He continues with a warning that the up-and-coming iPod generation [doesn’t] care about our notions of doctrinal purity and that they want their tools and gadgets to just work.

This is something that Firefox enthusiasts must take to heart, for what Raymond is talking about with regards to becoming the 64-bit desktop also applies to our dearly beloved open source browser.

The reality is that most people don’t care (or even know) what browser they’re using. In fact, as IE7 and Safari continue to improve, Firefox 2 is stagnating as a viable commercial product. The harsh truth is that once IE7 is pushed down the auto-update pipes, most people will no longer be incented to try Firefox since IE will once again be just good enough. It won’t matter whether they’re double-clicking the Blue E, a compass or some cute fox as long as they end up on MySpace.

If Firefox wants to continue its upward swing, it needs to continue to innovate and make things faster, easier, simpler and a better overall experience than its competitors. To date, Firefox 2 isn’t offering anything that wows me like something from an Apple product announcement (obviously heavy on the visuals, but stuff like CoreAnimation still rocks for devs). Until the community can answer Raymond’s warning, he may once again be foretelling the future.

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