Catering to the whims of the Web 2.0 crowd is tricky — but it usually doesn't bring in firetrucks. The Supernova conference, which wraps up tomorrow, served freshly made sliders, White Castle-style, at a party this evening. The fumes from this fare were enough to alarm San Francisco's fire department, which sent up a…

Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability,…

Joseph Smarr is Plaxo's chief platform architect and one of the data-portability Share Bears. He just wants you to be able to snuggle your friends from one website to the next. How sweet! Smarr gave a speech on the subject at this weekend's Foo Camp nerdfest. I'd do a 100-word version of it, but I just can't keep…

Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so…

Apparently someone told Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect, that he's a "rock star." Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. They were referring to your programming skills. Smarr does have the rock-and-roll look down, if not the sound. Here's a pic of him striking a hot pose.

Rapleaf is bragging that founder Auren Hoffman is an early signer of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. That blustering broadside, authored by Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Macromedia founder Marc Canter, videoblogger Robert Scoble, and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, wants to set your online profiles and…