joseph-smarr

Facebooker Dave Morin turns 28, but fails to destroy Internet

Owen Thomas · 10/15/08 04:00AM

When I got an unauthorized invite, via a tipster, to Dave Morin's birthday party Tuesday night, I knew I had to crash — if only to find out what he and his friends were thinking. Morin, you see, is a Facebook employee and a prime instigator of Camp Cyprus, the gang of Internet instigators whose shockingly fun video scandalized a shaken Silicon Valley. What's with these Web kids? First they go to Cyprus and destroy the entire economy by filming themselves cavorting at a rich friend's dad's vacation house on the Mediterranean. The horror! But then, what's worse, they return to the United States, unashamed, and continue spending money and enjoying themselves! All this economic activity cannot end well!Can you imagine, kids in their twenties having a good time? This must end! Didn't they get Sequoia's memo? Morin, Facebook's official speaker-to-geeks, turned 28 and rented a downtown art gallery Tuesday night to celebrate. After I tracked down Morin, I gave him a salami I'd picked up at VC firm Alsop Louie's party earlier that night. (It was a heartfelt regifting.) Besides Morin, I identified several other members of Camp Cyprus:

A gigantic picture of Robert Scoble for no reason

Owen Thomas · 09/24/08 03:20PM

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, who has discovered in the Web a popularity which escaped him in high school, has been moderating a panel titled "Web 2.0/Web 3.0 Mashup" at MIT's EmTech conference for the past hour. There are people from Facebook, Six Apart, and Plaxo on stage with him. With no introduction, Scoble launched into a meandering conversation about data portability, online video, URIs, social TV guides, and the Olympics. An hour later, it still has no sign of going anywhere. Joseph Smarr of Plaxo talks very fast. Dave Morin of Facebook seems very tired. Sample quote: "The pace of change is not indexable from a central service." The audience appears to be stunned into stupor. Does it matter that nothing is being said? Perhaps not; perhaps the point is to show this audience of technology generalists how insubstantial the obsessions of the Valley's geek set are.

Supernova conference interrupted by burger disaster

Owen Thomas · 06/17/08 09:50PM

Catering to the whims of the Web 2.0 crowd is tricky — but it usually doesn't bring in firetrucks. The Supernova conference, which wraps up tomorrow, served freshly made sliders, White Castle-style, at a party this evening. The fumes from this fare were enough to alarm San Francisco's fire department, which sent up a ladder crew to investigate. Photos from an eyewitness, after the jump:

Google to buy Plaxo — and a new pal — for $200 million?

Owen Thomas · 02/07/08 03:50PM

Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability, and so on — and I'm sure you'll read plenty of that. I think the real reason is much simpler. Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder now leading Google's social-network strategy, wants to work with Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect. I sat with the two at lunch at the Web 2.0 Summit last year, and they got along famously.

The Share Bears in the Land Without Portability

Tim Faulkner · 01/30/08 09:00PM

Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so concerned about our information. Like the Care Bears, by signing on to the DataPortability Working Group, top coders like Brad Fitzpatrick, Dave Recordon, and Ben Ling have joined forces to form a group which we can only call by one name. Presenting: The Share Bears!

Auren Hoffman's cynical ploy to set your profile "free"

Tim Faulkner · 09/06/07 04:11PM

Rapleaf is bragging that founder Auren Hoffman is an early signer of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. That blustering broadside, authored by Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Macromedia founder Marc Canter, videoblogger Robert Scoble, and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, wants to set your online profiles and friends lists, trapped on sites like Facebook, free. The central tenet of the Bill? That individual users retain "ownership of their own personal information" and that users have the "freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites." Which could come in handy as people begin to question Rapleaf's scraping of profile data from social networks — data these networks claim to own and have exclusive rights to.