The Brian Shaler Blog

It is Friday, and I am half-way through my March trip to San Francisco. I made sure my return flight is Saturday night so I have all day Saturday to hang out with people I know in the area and meet some new people.

I missed the first Social Media Breakfast in Phoenix, AZ, and noticed that San Francisco was not listed as a SMB city. I figured Saturday morning would be a great time to try it out!

8:30am-10:30am Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Town’s End Restaurant & Bakery
2 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA

To RSVP, go to the Upcoming event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/460948 (You can still show up if you don’t RSVP, but if we can’t get a bigger table at the last minute…. Oh well..)

Here is a map: Town’s End Restaurant & Bakery

Bonus!
Breakfast is on me (within reason, like $20 each) for the top 3 most-followed Twitter users who show up. Ideally, we’ll verify by sending a text message from your phone to 40404 (Twitter) with “stats” and see what number it returns. It’s a good way to verify that you own the account and that we are comparing the latest stats on your account.

Special thanks to Andrew Hyde, Brent Spore, Daniel Burka, Gary Vaynerchuk, Willo O’Brien, Jim Long, Justine Ezarik, Joshua Strebel, Ward Andrews, Marcus Nelson, Rob Sandie, Matt Mullenweg, and Thor Müller for not holding back!

You are cordially invited to watch and participate in a LIVE web demo of XID at http://ustream.tv/channel/brianshaler, starting at (about) 1:00pm MST/Arizona Saturday 2/2/2008.

Update: For time conversion and the current MST time, check out timeanddate.com

What is XID?

The XID project is intended to provide a free, open, and decentralized method of sharing your online presence with your friends.

The most important thing about social networks is being connected with your friends. By storing and filtering your friends’ XID information, you will easily be able to see which of your friends already have accounts on any given social network. No email address book importing. No searching for each of your friends’ names. You don’t need to rely on the web site’s friend-finding mechanisms if you have XID.

What will be Demo’d?
XID is a platform, and when the platform is launched, so will a set of complementary applications. The applications involved are not yet complete. I will be showing and explaining what has been completed so far. Currently, there is an optional web application that is intended to allow new users to quickly and easily set up an XID card without looking at any code. There is also a Firefox extension that allows users to import and manage their friends’ XID cards.

Web Application
The web application consists of these key features:

• Registration/Login: Create a card and come back to edit it
• 3-step process of creating an XID card: Save basic personal information (Name, Location, etc), contact information, and profile URLs (all optional)
• Profile URLs: People who use the same screen name on multiple sites can add them to their XID card with one click
• Public URL for XID card: Give this URL to their friends

Those features have been at least partially implemented and they can be previewed right now. There will be more features in the near future.

Firefox Extension
The Firefox sidebar extension consists of these key features:

• Add: Paste a friend’s URL and the extension will retrieve the friend’s XID card and add it to a local/client-side database
• Friends List: Display all friends and show how many social networks they are on
• Networks List: Display all networks friends are on, in order of popularity
• Friend Detail View: Display all social networks a specific friend is on and provide links to the user’s profiles
• Network Detail View: Display all friends on a given social network
• Recent Activity: Shows if friends have added or removed any social networks

Again, those are features that are at least partially implemented and there will be more to come.

NOT Just a Tour
There is no scheduled end time for this Live web demo. After an initial tour is complete, I will discuss current and future features with anyone in the UStream chat room (UStream account NOT required to participate!). I will also work on writing code to implement features while discussing them. Live.

At the expense of a little productivity, I will attempt to multi-task.

I finally made it to Social Media Club. It was my first time and overall, it was a worthwhile evening.

The topic was a presentation by Arizona-based white label video site, V:social. I have heard about the site, but it was great to see a more detailed view of their platform. It was also great to see some of the implementations of their product. As a white label video player, you can be watching V:social video without even knowing it (and I have!). Great company. Great product. Great presentation. Glad to hear about companies like this thriving in Phoenix.

There were two other highlights of the night. As I introduced myself, Francine Hardaway, an “uber” networking maven if I’ve ever seen one, interrupted me immediately after I said my name. “Oh HEY!” she said. “I (@hardaway) follow you (@brianshaler) on Twitter.” That happens from time to time with people I’ve never met, and it’s always awkward. But because this was Francine, it was awkward + awesome.

The other highlight was the guy that introduced himself by saying “I invented Web 2.0 in 1991.” Yes, an Al Gore joke inevitably followed (it wasn’t me, I promise…. but it was definitely on the tip of my tongue).

Social Media Club meetings are on the second Thursday of every month. Check out SMCphoenix.com for more information.

BarCampPhoenix is tomorrow, so I figured I would help spread the word in any way I could.

I am currently developing something that would be great to present and talk about at BarCamp. It is not near completion, but I will be working late into the night tonight to try to get it to a ‘proof of concept’ condition that I can demo.

Some hints:
- Related to contact management
- Decentralized, peer-to-peer foundation, aided by an optional web service
- Designed to be developer-friendly to spur the development of tools/gadgets
- Currently developing a Firefox extension that utilizes a client-side database (pretty awesome)
- Intended to impact the way people use & find social networks
- Intended to help people stay in touch, stay organized, and stay up-to-date

Hopefully this sounds interesting to you. If so, come to BarCampPhoenix and be one of the first to learn about this exciting project!