Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS

Currently, Sean is the VP of Business Development & Product Management at mSpoke, Inc. Sean also regularly contributes to the influential Read/WriteWeb blog and hosts the weekly podcast Read/WriteTalk. Once an aspiring programmer, Sean has found his niche as a new technology evangelist. Currently, this manifests itself in his passion for helping publishers revitalize their online content with mSpoke’s adaptive personalization solutions. Prior to co-founding mSpoke, Sean was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Industry Center and served on the Editorial Advisory Board and as a columnist for Information Week. He holds a B. S. in Computer Information Systems from Grove City College.

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Ian Kennedy is product manager for MyBlogLog, a service Yahoo! acquired in January 2007. He has been with Yahoo! since 2005 and held roles in corporate development and the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Prior to Yahoo!, Kennedy was director of Sales & Partner Development at Six Apart and was also at Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters joint venture where he held roles in product management, business development, and sales.

He is the founder of one of the Web’s longest running weekly city guide sites, Tokyo Q (www.tokyoq.com), an English language city guide for visitors and residents of Tokyo.

Kennedy earned a BA at UC Berkeley. He currently lives in the San Francisco area with his wife and two children. He blogs at http://everwas.com.

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Bret Taylor is one of the founders of FriendFeed, which makes it easy to keep track of the web pages, videos, music, and photos your friends and family discover around the Internet. Before starting FriendFeed, Bret was at Google for four years, where he launched Google Maps, Google Local, the Google Maps API, and founded Google’s Developer product group. Bret has a MS and BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Kevin Marks is a Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, bringing external developers and Google engineers together to make a better web. Over the last 20 years he’s alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. The common thread has been working out how people, computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com

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David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that’s been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the web. Recordon’s history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O’Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award.

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