David Recordon

David Recordon is the Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, where he leads open source and open standards initiatives. He joined Facebook from Six Apart where he focused on platform strategies, and previously worked at VeriSign in the emerging business group. David has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies, such as OpenID and OAuth. He collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the Web. In 2007, he became the youngest recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Why f8 was good for the open web

by  | @daveman692  | 23 April 2010

Disclosure: I joined Facebook last Fall. Over a year ago I predicted that they would open up. It's easy as a technologist to think about openness solely in terms of technology, but openness is broader than that. Openness of technology means that others can build using the same tools that you do. Openness of data means that developers can build...

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What's going on with OAuth?

What's going on with OAuth?

by  | @daveman692  |  8 January 2010

WRAP attempts to simplify the OAuth protocol, primarily by dropping the signatures, and replacing them with a requirement to acquire short lived tokens over SSL. It is not an even trade-off, and the new proposal has a different set of security characteristics, benefits, and shortcomings.

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Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social

by  | @daveman692  | 17 August 2009

From infrastructure technologies like OpenID and OpenSocial, to widgets like ShareThis and Friend Connect, to The New York Times itself and your phone, features and interactions that you once only found on social networks are becoming ubiquitous. While it may be convenient for the DoD's IT department to think about social networking as a list of URLs that they can block from any network, the reality is that social networking is becoming a core piece of the web itself.

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FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social

by  | @daveman692  |  5 June 2009

Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.

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Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden

by  | @daveman692  |  4 March 2009

A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user. This is the same model that destroyed AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy's ISP businesses when normal people chose the Internet itself versus their thoughtfully curated walled gardens.

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Anatomy of "Connect"

by  | @daveman692  | 17 February 2009

I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure...

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