Building the open web

Over the past few years, one of the major themes that have developed focuses on the Open Web (e.g. "Social Web", "portable social networks", "data portability", etc). At the end of the day, it isn’t just about who you know and how you know them, but rather a much larger desire for data portability via open web technologies.

RSS, Atom, Jabber, OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, and other open community-built technologies took off in 2007 for this exact reason. Mashups are no longer just about consuming feeds and presenting the data in a different light, but are becoming about how you can use multiple services together in harmony while keeping you in control of everything you create online. How do these technologies relate to each other and how can they be used together to build sites that support the Open Web?

Join me in looking at what happened in 2007 that caused this topic to become so important, how various open technologies can help to solve these problems, and who is doing it right.