Details of my upcoming panel at Microsoft's MIX 09 conference are below.

Standards for Aggregating Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services MIX09-T28F

Thursday March 19 |2:30 PM-3:45 PM | Lando 4204 (might be changing to 4201)

By: Marc Canter, Monica Keller, Kevin Marks, John McCrea, Dare Obasanjo Tags: Services

Come hear a broad panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area including Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft as panel moderator, Kevin Marks from Google, Monica Keller from MySpace, Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics, and John McCrea from Plaxo.

News feeds and activity streams as they pertain to social networks is a pretty hot topic given the rise of services like Twitter and Facebook along with their attendant ecosystems. As more and more services provide activity streams as APIs and we see them showing up across different web sites such as FriendFeed and on the desktop (e.g. Seesmic for Facebook, Tweetdeck's new Facebook integration, etc), it is a great time to talk about whether we need standards in this space and what they should look like.

There is also interesting food for thought as to whether we have reached the state of the art in this space or whether there is still more innovation to be seen and also what form it could potentially take. Most importantly, as social networks start propagating activity across each other (e.g. using Twitter to update Facebook status, sharing Flickr activities with my Windows Live Messenger buddies, etc) is this the beginning of the much heralded dream of social network interoperability or are we still far away from making this a reality?

PS: We might have a surprise fifth panelist. I'm still working on the details and will update this post if the person can make it.

Now Playing: Mystikal - Unpredictable