Google's Joe Kraus Discusses the Social Web At Supernova Conference

Google’s Director of Product Management Joe Kraus (the guy behind Open Social and other Google products) is talking today at the Supernova Conference in San Francisco on the topic of “social computing” and the how Google Friend Connect fits into the ecosystem with OpenID, OAuth, etc. The live stream is below.

Note: The video halts around the 9:23 mark because of bad reception. You’ll need to manually seek past that point to continue watching until the end.

http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=0ca62d77eb4d45f88389467b5b56f8d8&vid=104843&playback=false&polling=false&user=techcrunch&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous

Kraus talks about how social networking may be the “new black”, but connecting people on the web is not a new idea. A shift is occurring, however, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends directly) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook where they will show up in friends’ news feeds). The “publish, then filter” mentality leads to more sharing because people don’t worry as much about appearing self-important.

He sees the web as evolving to a point where it’s entirely social. Just as user generated content can be distributed across websites now, users’ social connections will span sites in the future. Google Friend Connect is meant to facilitate this evolution by tackling three main problems: establishing identity, authorizing sites, and distributing social applications. The three standards at the core of this project are OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, which respectively address each of those problems.