Bastian Hofmann

A busy autumn lies ahead

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:00:50 +0200

… at least conference wise. Next to the OSCON in Portland next week I have been accepted at quite some other conferences in the next month:

First stop will be the Devlink Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I’ll be doing three talks:

Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands
Distributed Identities with OpenID
Crossing the boundaries of web applications with OpenSocial

And since I have never been in this part of the states before, I also have a few days before the conference to get to know Tennessee. Unfortunately the Devlink conference collides with this year’s Froscon, which I’ll be unable to attend therefor.
After that in September I’ll visit the PHP Unconference in Hamburg, which will be my first unconference ever by the way.
Last but not least there are two great conferences in October, where I’ll be speaking: WebTech 2011 in Mainz (which will be held together with the IPC again) and the Web DevCon in Hamburg.

Bye, bye VZnet, Hello ResearchGate

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:07:05 +0200

I already announced it on Twitter a few weeks ago, but it’s time to make an official small blog post about it as well.

After nearly three years, I’ll be leaving VZnet at the end of August. My time there was really great. I learned a lot, wrote my bachelor thesis, launched OpenSocial, OAuth2 and VZ-ID, OEmbed and a lot of other stuff, started speaking at national and international conferences and worked in probably one of the best engineering teams in Germany. And VZ parties are legendary as well.

So I’m certainly feeling a bit sad closing this chapter of my live, but on the other hand I’m really excited about what’s to come:

Beginning September I’ll be joining ResearchGate, the leading social network for science and one of the hottest startups in Berlin. RG is still a bit smaller then VZ (around 50 people), but they have a very international team and I’m very much looking forward to creating something which helps scientists to do their work.

Speaking at OSCON

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:51:08 +0200

Yay, my JavaScript Mashup talk was accepted at this year’s OSCON (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18419) and I’m very much looking forward to come to Portland to this great and hugh conference (just have a look at the full schedule). Also I’m very grateful for the ability to present this talk a second time, since doing it this week at the IPC was a lot of fun and I got great feedback on it.

And the best thing if you are think about going there: you can use os11fos as a discount code to get 20% off.

So hope to see you all at OSCON in July :-)

Upcoming conferences

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:34:31 +0200

There are some upcoming conferences in the next weeks where I’ll be speaking or travelling to. Here are the details:

First I’ll be speaking at the Quo Vadis Game Development conference in Berlin on the creation of OpenSocial games:

How to create social games for millions of users

Social games have become very popular in the last years. In this workshop I will show you how to create an OpenSocial based game which can be played by over 900 million users on many social networks around the world. After introducing you to the main concepts behind OpenSocial I will demonstrate live that it is easier than you think to develop a rich social game. Additionally to the basics like accessing the user’s social graph through the REST or JavaScript API, communication with backends or integration with external APIs through OAuth, I will also highlight features that will help you with a quick viral distribution, tight integration into the user’s social experience and access through mobile devices.

03. May 2011 - Raum A04 - Beginn: 13:30 Uhr - Dauer: 90 min.

A few days after that I’ll be heading to San Francisco for this year’s Google IO and the OpenSocial State of the Union.

When I’m back the IPC 2011 Spring Edition is coming up where I’ll be presenting on JavaScript Mashups:

Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced Techniques for modern Web Apps

Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques helping you with such problems.

31.05.2011 | 14:15 - 15:15

Originally I had planned to go to the CodeStock conference in Knoxville after that, where my JavaScript Mashup talk had been accepted as well but unfortunately the dates are colliding with the Federated Social Web Conference in Berlin, which I’ll be attending instead now.

CodeStock 2011 Speaker Voting

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:27:00 +0100

The speaker voting at this years CodeStock conference (June 3rd/4th in Knoxville, TN) has just opened. I really like the fact that all attendees can vote on the sessions they want to see. So if you want me there and hear about some interesting stuff regarding OpenSocial, OpenID and it’s problems, the Federated Social Web and the protocols around it, or some advanced JavaScript Mash-Up techniques, you can vote for one of my proposals:

Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced techniques for modern web applications
Track / Area: Developer / Web - JavaScript
Technology: JavaScript, WebSockets, CORS, OAuth2, Caja, HTML5
General / Specific Experience Level: Intermediate / Intermediate
Start Time / Length / 70 min
Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend and only provide an API endpoint at their backend, resulting in a much more fluent and desktop-application-like user experience. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques, some older, some brand new, and show you examples which will help you to:
make API calls to external domains.

authenticate these calls through OAuth without compromising your secrets.

load external content and JavaScript widgets safely.

send JavaScript messages between frames on different domains.

get real-time notifications from your backend.

and use the browser to store the some of the user’s data.

http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/mashing-up-javascript-advanced-techniques-for-modern-web-applications.aspx

Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands
Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: Federated Social Web, open standards
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
Social networks are not closed off to the rest of the web anymore. Various standards like ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, OpenSocial, Salmon, OEmbed, XAuth or OExchange are emerging to open them up to other websites and projects like Diaspora or Status.NET are already using them in production. I will introduce these protocols, show how they work together, how you can benefit from them and give an outlook on how they can possibly change the world of social networks.
http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/opening-up-the-social-web-standards-that-are-bridging-the-islands.aspx

Distributed Identities with OpenID
Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: OpenID, OAuth, OAuth2, OpenID Connect
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
The era of many separated logins and identities in the web is slowly coming to an end. Currently many of the big players are spurring this on with their own proprietary solutions, but open standards are starting to get more support as well with OpenID being the most promising one. In this session I will start off discussing what identity means offline and online and the ways one uses different identities quite naturally. Based on this I will introduce different concepts of how you can represent your identities in the web, where current problems are and what solutions different players came up with. Besides the currently wide spread proprietary solutions, such as Facebook Connect or Twitter Anywhere, I will highlight OpenID as an open and distributed alternative. I will show how OpenID works for users and developers, where it currently fails and how OpenID is planned to evolve in the future through emerging specifications like OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. Additionally I will give an outlook on how browser vendors could possibly influence the identity game drastically by better authorization support such as the use of client side certificates.
http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/distributed-identities-with-openid.aspx

How to create social apps for millions of users
Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: OpenSocial, PHP, JavaScript
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
When OpenSocial was first introduced three years ago, the main goal was to create an open and distributed alternative to the closed off Facebook platform for social apps. Since then much has happened: The specification as well as the OpenSocial foundation behind it have majored and powerful new features and concepts have been introduced. More and more social networks are implementing OpenSocial containers, allowing developers to reach over 900 million users with one social app. Additionally education organizations and enterprise companies like IBM, SAP, SurfNET or Atlassian are seeing the benefits of an open standard to connect their applications more tightly and to open them up to other developers. In this presentation I will introduce you to the OpenSocial specification and walk you through a live-programming example to show you how easy it is to connect an existing PHP web application to enterprise products such as Google Mail or Confluence and social networks alike, integrating it right into your user’s existing tools and workflows.
http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/how-to-create-social-apps-for-millions-of-users.aspx

Recap NJIT OpenSocial Hackathon

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:40:22 +0100

Last weekend (Feb. 5th - 6th) I was invited to speak about OpenSocial at the OpenSocial Hackathon organized by Elsevier and the New Jersey Institute of Technolog (NJIT). Now that I have completely slept off my jet lag (two 8h flights with a 6h time difference within 4 days is really no fun at all) it’s finally time for a short recap:

The whole hackathong was an amazing event, relaxed atmosphere, great organization, interesting people and very dedicated participants. It was great to see all the great ideas students come up with, if you just give them some open APIs and 24 hours to hack.

This, as well as the final results, shows how powerful open standards like OpenSocial can be to create innovative mash ups that connect data data from different sources intelligently and that are integrated right into user’s existing workflows.

Personally I spoke more about the history of OpenSocial, different usages, the OpenSocial Foundation and OpenSocial’s future with OpenSocial 2.0, but also managed to get some technical stuff in by talking about new OpenSocial features like templates, proxied content and data pipelining ;-)

You can find the slides here:

Kudos also to the folks at Elsevier for such a good OpenSocial integration in their Sciverse Applications platform.

IPC 2011 Spring Edition

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:09:26 +0100

I’m very happy to annonce that I’ll be speaking at the International PHP Conference this spring in Berlin:

Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced techniques for modern web apps

Speaker: Bastian Hofmann

Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques helping you with such problems.

http://phpconference.com/2011spring/

I’m looking forward to this talk very much since it’s a topic that I haven’t talked about before and will cover a lot of cool stuff for modern JavaScript based web applications.

Confoo 2011

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:21:00 +0100

I’m very happy to have been chosen to speak about OpenID and OpenSocial at this years Confoo conference in Montreal, Canada (March, 9th to March, 11th).

Here arte the details:

Distributed Identities with OpenID

The era of many separated logins and identities in the web is slowly coming to an end. Currently many of the big players are spurring this on with their own proprietary solutions, but open standards are starting to get more support as well with OpenID being the most promising one. In this session I will show how OpenID works for users and developers, where it currently fails and how OpenID is planned to evolve in the future.

How to create social apps for millions of users

Social apps have become very popular in the last years. In this session I will show you how to create an OpenSocial app which can be used by over 900 million users on many social networks around the world. After introducing you to the main concepts behind OpenSocial I will demonstrate live that it is easier than you think to develop a rich social app. Additionally to the basics like accessing the user’s social graph or integration with external APIs, I will also highlight features that will help you with a quick viral distribution, tight integration into the user’s social experience and access through mobile devices.

http://confoo.ca/en/speaker/bastian-hofmann

First VZ GeekCon

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100

On December 7th we organized the first GeekCon in Berlin. It was a very fun event and I’m looking forward to the next event.

This time I did two sessions. I introduced the technical background of VZ-ID and VZ-Login and I spoke about the Federated Social Web.

Here are the slides:

OpenSocial Europe Summit 2010

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100

On December 6th I attended the OpenSocial Europe Summit which was hosted by SurfNET in Utrecht (NL). The main focus was on the usage of OpenSocial in education software and it was great to see OpenSocial being adopted in new and different contexts outside of classical social networks.

I also was able to do two presentations, one on OpenSocial App programming and an impromtu session on the Federated Social Web. Here are the slides:

Browsergames Forum 2010

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

I had the opportunity to do two talks about OpenSocial on this years Browsergames Forum in Offenbach, Germany (near Frankfurt am Main).

Here are the slides:

WebTech 2010

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 01:32:00 +0200

I’ll be speaking at this years WebTech conference in Mainz about OpenID and the Federated Social Web.

The Details:

Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands

Social networks are not closed off to the rest of the web anymore. Various standards like ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, OpenSocial, Salmon, OEmbed, XAuth or OExchange are emerging to open them up to other websites. I will introduce these protocols, show how they work together, how you can benefit from them and give an outlook on how they will change the world of social networks.

13.10.2010 | 11:45 - 12:45 | Room: Dijonsaal

Distributed Identities with OpenID

The era of many separated logins and identities in the web is slowly coming to an end. Currently many of the big players are spurring this on with their own proprietary solutions, but open standards are starting to get more support as well with OpenID being the most promising one. In this session I will show how OpenID works for users and developers, where it currently fails and how OpenID is planned to evolve in the future.

12.10.2010 | 16:30 - 17:30 | Room: Dijonsaal

You can find more information at http://webtechcon.de/

Here are the slides:

Slides - Jazoon 2010 (Zürich, Switzerland)

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200

OpenSocial done right - Integrating OpenSocial for 16 million users

In my session I will introduce the OpenSocial API and its benefits. I will show how to implement an OpenSocial container into a website with the help of the Apache Shindig project while setting a focus on data privacy, security and scalability. Successful example will be the integration of OpenSocial into Germany’s leading social entworks studiVZ, meinVZ and schülerVZ.

Slides - next10 (Berlin, Germany)

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Social apps done right

One year ago we were faced with the task of providing an app platform for the 16 million users of our three Social networks studiVZ, meinVZ and schülerVZ. Our aim: to create the best social app platform out there based on Open Social. Today, five month after launch, we want to share the story of how we accomplished these aims. We will show how apps are performing on our platform, as well as introduce our plans for further improvements of the developer and user app-experience which are being developed right now.

WebTech 2009

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Together with Sebastian Galonska I did my first talk about OpenSocial on the 2009 WebTech Conference in Karlsruhe. It was a great event and I’m looking forward to the next opportunities to further promote an open social web.

Here are the slides: