GigaOM » Joseph Smarr

How Google+ is built

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 23:00:42 +0000

If you’re curious about all things Google+, you’re in luck. The project’s technical lead, Google engineer Joseph Smarr, is currently hosting an online question and answer session about the service — and he has already shared a number of details about Google+’s development, technology, and plans for the future.

On Monday, Smarr opened himself up for questions on Q&A website AnyAsq.com, a Y-Combinator-backed site reminiscent of Formspring.me where users can invite others to “ask me anything.” People sign in to post questions on AnyAsq through their Twitter accounts, but a host’s responses can be longer than 140 characters.

Smarr has already answered 270 queries, and as of press time, his AnyAsq page is still open for questions. Here’s some of what he has revealed so far:

Google+ fast tracked its development from the start
“We put extra emphasis on engineering speed/agility–we try to release code updates on a daily basis while still keeping quality/stability/latency as high as you’d expect from Google.”

New features are absolutely on the way
“…Personally I’m eager for many of the features other Google+ users have asked for recently: smarter ranking/collapsing/filtering in the stream and notifications… integration with more Google products… and an API so I can start hacking on cool uses of circles, etc.”

Hashtags are on Google+’s radar
In response to a question about adding hashtags to help filter Google+ posts, Smarr responded: “Personally, I want this too.”

There was some fancy footwork on the programming front
“A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive.”

Although none of Smarr’s responses have been shockingly revealing, the AnyAsq activity is just the latest example of how Google has worked hard to project an air of openness throughout the entire Google+ launch. Where the now-defunct Google Wave was developed with an air of secrecy that ultimately confused users as to its purpose, Google’s strategy with the Plus project has been one of transparency and agility — a “done is better than perfect” attitude. So far, it’s been a refreshing approach. The challenge for the future will be maintaining that flexibility as Google+ grows.

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Mr. Open Web Goes to Google

Liz Gannes — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:15:32 +0000

Chris Messina, self-titled “open web advocate,” will take that official title at Google starting Monday, he announced today on his blog. He joins Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, who will also start working for Google later this month. Smarr and Messina are both board members of the OpenID Foundation. The two have been frequent collaborators on open web projects, and co-host the podcast TheSocialWeb.tv (where Messina also announced the news — embedded below).

http://www.viddler.com/player/95b8fc9d/

Much of Messina’s work will remain outside of Google, though clearly the hope is that he’ll affect the company’s social web products. Messina, who had previously formed Citizen Agency, the consulting firm, and worked with Mozilla, Vidoop and Flock, says he hopes to help create an “OpenID Connect” to compete with Facebook and Twitter Connect. He added via email that he’d like to build out openweb.org as a sort of app store for open web technology that would be a “clearinghouse and promotion factory” for such projects.

Google, which lags far behind the competition on social products, recently announced a public commitment to “openness” that met mixed reviews, seeing as it still holds its search and advertising businesses close to the vest. However, the hiring of Messina and Smarr gives the company more credibility in these areas. Meanwhile, Messina and Smarr get a much bigger stage to try to embed their ideas into products. Messina writes,

I want more success in turning my ideas into tangible outcomes, and in doing so, prove the power that I see in open, interoperable standards that can make the web a richer and more intricately spun space.

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Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr Will Lead Google's Social Web Efforts

Liz Gannes — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:55:30 +0000

Joseph Smarr, CTO of Comcast-owned Plaxo, announced today he is joining Google to lead “a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web.” Smarr, who said he will start at Google in late January, has become highly influential on open social web topics even as Plaxo has stayed mostly out of the spotlight, for instance serving on the OpenID Foundation and OpenSocial Foundation board, giving a talk at events like Google I/O (embedded below) and the OpenID Summit, and co-authoring a “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.”

http://www.youtube.com/v/6SYnlH5FXz0&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Smarr had joined Plaxo as its first employee eight years ago, and said he took the job at Google for its promise to help evolve the web.

Getting the future of the Social Web right—including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph—is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come.

As an aside, I attended a talk at the recent Supernova conference during which Google VP product management Bradley Horowitz spoke of an internal Google conversation about prospective hires in which a colleague warned him “It’s better that we don’t hire these clueful people.” The idea was that smart folks could better help advise, push and regulate Google from outside of the company rather than within. I remember wondering if they were talking about Smarr — well, if they were, it seems they changed their minds.

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