Jeff Barr - is the guy behind Amazon’s APIs and web services. After practically inventing the open web years ago - with their basic APIs - Amazon has continued to hold their own, focusing on exactly where meatspace meets cyberspace - in selling stuff. Their S3 storage service and EC2 computing service has been recently joined by a database service! OMG! Whether its discussing REST vs SOAP or participating in panels - Jeff is bringing the vision of the open web - to the streets. Amazon is holding its in the world of clouds - and the guy making it all happen is Jeff Barr! He’s my ‘dude of the year!’

David Recordon - if there ever was an Ambassador for open user centric identity, OpenID2 and the world we’re moving into - it’s this young guy named David. He seems to have this finger on the nervous system of our open standards efforts. Just watch and listen to David and you’ll know what’s up. If I was a geek groupie hottie I’d be chasing David.

Brad Fiztpatrick - if David is the Ambassador, Brad is the introverted geek hiding out in the backroom writing the code and figuring out the memes that reverberate throughout our world. Brad was one of the founders of LiveJournal, wrote memcache and then wrote OpenID. His recent manifesto (along with David) “Brad’s thoughts on the social graph” sent shockwaves throughout the world of social networking and social media.

Kaliya Hamlin - last year we voted Kaliya ‘Identity person of the Year’. She followed 2006 with an amazing year of tireless efforts in Identity Workshops and unconferences around the world. Kaliya and I put on the DataSharingSummit in Sept and it was a great event. Kaliya is the gal who keeps it all real. My favorite Kaliya skill is her ability to get warring factions to actually shutup and listen to each other!

Chris Messina - is a hacker (aka ‘Factory Joe‘) who tirelessly keeps the fire burning hot in the world of open source social media and social networking code. He’s currently using Wordpress as a platform to mesh together all sorts of identity and profile accounts - utilizing open standards. Chris is also partially responsible for all the BarCamps that have erupted around the world. OpenID2, oAuth, microformats, Diso - Chris is helping to make the world of open social networking - a reality. And giving all the code away.

Dare Obasanjo - this guy works for Microsoft and has gone from being yet another project manager and part-time coder of RSS Bandit - to being “the new Robert Scoble” - i.e. the person who is single handedly changing the world’s largest software company. Did you know that Windows Live Contacts has open APIs to 260 million accounts and 20B relationships? Well somebody had to do it - that guy’s name is Dare. Avid blogger, articulate leader, I just love this guy!

Google’s unnamed Hackers - sure they have the most number of assembled Phds in one place, but its the the legions of anonymous programmers at Google that are changing are world. Thank you dudes and dudesses for OpenSocial, iGoogle, Orkut, Reader, Maps, Docs, Earth, Google 101 and more to come! Keep going, don’t stop!

Dave Morin - this is the guy who symbolizes Facebook - for me. He’s the human face in the world’s most important leader in the world of social networking. Dave is the head of Facebook’s platform efforts - which could be argued was the most important event of 2007. And in fact all those ‘little things‘ wrong with Facebook - aren’t Dave’s fault! My own interaction with Dave, strictly via Facebook’s messages feature, have been exemplar.

David Winer - what can you say about a guy who invented RSS, XML-RPC, and helped show us the power of blogging, CMSs, outlining, hierarchical indexing and navigation and the power of independent scripting? Dave and I did a debate at Stewart Alsop’s ‘Agenda’ conference - back in the 80’s on Hypercard. I’m a trained performer - but Dave held his own. He’s been holding his own for over 20+ years in our industry and IMHO is the single most important in creating what is known as Web 2.0. His principles, evangelism, zealotry and code are what its all about.

Joseph Smarr - is the architect at Plaxo responsible for all their products, strategy and latest leadership moves. Joseph and I penned ‘The Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media.” Valleywag recently revealed that Joseph is a rocker as well. Thanks Joseph for all your hard work!

Leah Culver - is the coder behind Pownce. She’s not afraid to do everything herself and showed off features in Pownce at our DataSharingSummit that others are now copying. Not only is Leah smart as hell, but she’s on the forefront of defining what geek hotties are all about! In a world of bimbo Britneys and tatooed tarts, Leah succeeds despite her beauty.

Phil Pearson - is the senior programmer at Broadband Mechanics and one of those unheralded hackers of the world. Phil lives down in ChristChurch, New Zealand and invented a new approach to connecting social networking features into ANY software - which we’re using in our upcoming projects with Acteva, Bell Canada and RadioOne. I love Phil and his wife Kyoko and we’re trying to convince them to move here to California. Meanwhile - I can’t wait till all the people on this list check out what Phil has been up to!

Mary Hodder - is the CEO of dabble and an early pioneer in blogging, user’s rights and tagging. When Mary heard of our ‘Bill of Rights’ she changed the end-user TOS (terms of service) for dabble to allow the user to retain the ownership of all the data collected on them and their behavior inside of dabble. Then the TOS asks simply for a non-exclusive copy of this data for its own usage. This is EXACTLY how ALL vendor’s TOS should work. For this little bit of intelligent, break through insight - Mary is the top leader in the world of social media - IMHO.

Jeff Jarvis - is an old school journalist and editor who has swallowed the red pill and is leading the world of open journalism and blogging. He’s been working on the networked journalism summit this year. Jeff is one of acerbic writers who when taking on Dell Computer - literally got that company to improve its terms of service and customer support. When Jeff blogs - Michael Dell listens.

Dick Hardt - is the CEO of Sxip Networks and one of the leaders of user centric oriented systems. When his own efforts to make Sxip a stand alone standard stalled, Dick decided to contribute a core part of his technology to OpenID2. That portion is called the Attribute Exchange. Its that kind of selfless recognition of what’s best and what’s needed - is what makes Dick stand out from the rest. Their product Sxipper is exactly the kind of user centric stuff - we’ve all been talking about. He’s also well known for his Identity 2.0 talks. Here’s the latest version of Dick’s Identity 2.0 talk.

Dan Farber - and I go way back to the world of Macintoshs and 1984. He’s been an editor in the tech business for 25+ years and a personal friend. Its Dan that always lets me know how the world really sees me. Dan is currently the editor of ZDNet and their ‘Between the Lines’ blog. But its his intelligence and insights into our industry that separates him from the rest!

Hooman Radfar - is the CEO of Clearspring - the widget platform. Hooman is rarely seen in public, as he’s constantly out signing up customers and burning paths through the world of the distributed web. When I met Hooman they were pitching what they were doing as ’semantic web’ stuff - coming straight out of CMU. So I told them “don’t EVER use that SW term again - just call it smart widgets” - and wallah - thus was born the Clearspring platform (well maybe it wasn’t as simple as that!) If you want to collect statistics on your widgets, use Clearspring.

Kim Cameron - is THE identity czar at Micrsoft. Several years ago Kim approaches some of us saying - “he needed us to help promote the notion of a meta-identity standard” - which would inter-connect together various different identity systems into a safe, secure, phish proof environment. Well he did it - it’s called Cardspace and it supports OpenID.

Richard MacManus - is the editor and publisher of Read/Write Web - one of the rising blogging platforms today. We hired Richard to help us a couple of years ago - as we’re loyal to smart, Kiwi Web 2.0 nerds! Anyway Richard has proven why he’s one of the smartest guys on the web today. His surveys on a particular space or area - are always considered to be the ‘word’.

John Musser - is the guy behind Programmable web - the definitive guide to systems with open APIs. I use John’s master list of systems with open APIs to give me a barometer of how our progress is doing - and how many of these systems have two-way APIs. Keep your eye in Programmable web.

Doc Searls - is the man. A long time leader in the blogosphere Doc is now a happy fellow at the Berkman Institute at Harvard - working on a movement of VRM (vendor relationship management.) Doc is one of the founders of the Identity gang and a close friend. One thing I love about Doc is presentation style. At LeWeb3 he did a talk on “What happens when the users are in charge?”.

Loic Lemeur - Loic moved to SF and has shown a unique understanding of not only how th game is played, but that he has his ear to the rail of coming trends, products and services. Loic’s Seesmic is forging new ground and his recent LeWeb conference is the current worldwide leader of ‘all things hip’ (let alone the best conference food - ever!)

Ron Conway - I usually don’t plug investors and he’s never really given me the time of day but the guy seems nice enough, really smart, and has helped out a SHITLOAD of startups and entrepreneurs - which is a good thing. Without Angel investors like Ron - we wouldn’t be here today.

Paul Kedrovsky - aka pk - is one of those VCs who have integrity, brains and is willing to share it with others. His blog - Infectious Greed - is one of my favorite insights into the world of capitalism - which recently has had it’s own dash of cold water. Reading pk’s observations gives me a daily smile. PK is also a VC - but I don’t hold it against him - cause he’s a Canadian VC.

Rafat Ali - is the editor and publisher of ContentNext - the folks behind PaidContent.org, MocoNews and ContentSutra. Rafat’s insights and instincts help me track the world of money and the web - usually based upon the stumblings and bumblings of bigCo media. Rafat (and his partner Staci Kramer) are one of the reasons why the Web 2.0 is different.

And people who get plenty of press and who don’t need my mention….

Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Fred Wilson, Joi Ito, Tim O’Reilly, Brad Horowitz, Stewart Butterfield, Tariq Krim

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.