# F. Randall Farmer > Social Product Design Catalyst Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/frandallfarmer Entrepreneur, Inventor, Author, Speaker, Advisor, and Podcaster for all things multiuser, realtime, and social. Presently Executive Director at the Spritely Networked Communities Institute, a nonprofit that is leading the way to fully decentralize trust, identity, and community on the Internet. Personal specialties: Reputation Systems, Social Software, Virtual Communities. Virtual Economies, Virtual Worlds, Online Identity, Distributed Objects, Capability Systems, Open Social Co-creator: - First MMO/Virtual world (Lucasfilm's Habitat) & leader open source restoration NeoHabitat.org - Pre-web virtual information markets @ AMiX - JSON data protocol and supporting tools (proto-node) @ State Software - E programming language - first Capabilities, Promises, Futures, and Vats @ Communites.com - Vitality streams (aka newsfeeds), Fine grained permissions (Google circles), capability-enabled previews, and mass scalable reputatation systems @ Yahoo - Many others for companies around the globe - see Patents section ## Work Experience ### Advisor @ Playable Worlds Jan 2019 – Present | San Diego Metropolitan Area Advising on Social Design for Playable Worlds http://playableworlds.com ### Social Product Design Catalyst @ Many Companies Jan 2003 – Present | Global practice, based in the San Francisco Bay area Worked with the following companies with their social product design issues, including identity, user generated content, reputation, community formation and management - engagement and growth. Citrix (intranet), eBay (reputation), KPMG (big data), NextDoor (community), Telligent (community reputation), Scripps (media), Zynga (games), WeListen (ideation), Sococo (distributed team tools), Discourse.org (reputation & community), Answers.com (reputation & community), RIT (industry advisor), Metaplace.com (advisor, IP, social & virtual currency), Linden Lab (VW product design), Google, Playable Worlds, Noice, and Spritely Networked Communities Institute. Invited speaker at Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Twitch ### Executive Director @ Spritely Networked Communities Institute Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 Centralization broke social on the Internet. We're here to fix it. We are leading Open Implementations and Standards to create a new fully-decentralized infrastructure layer of trust, identity, and community. ### Social Product Design Catalyst (Contractor) @ Addecco (Google) Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Googleplex, Mt. View, Ca Providing expertise in social product design and challenges for the world's largest internet company. ### Open Source Project Lead @ neohabitat.org Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Oakland, CA Lucasfilm's Habitat was the first MMO/Virtual World, shipping on the Commodore 64 in 1988 under the name QLink's Club Caribe, but it went through an extensive year long beta test. NeoHabitat.org is the Open Source project that restores this historically significant multi-user game to full post-beta test functionality, using the original C64 binaries and a rewrite of the original game server in Java/Javascript. The service is now fully operational on all platforms (via emulators) and on original C64. I lead this open source effort to restore this game as a public service - sponsored by The Museum of Digital Entertainment (The MADE) of Oakland, California. The entire product source is available at GitHub, and ready-to-play package is at http://neohabitat.org ### Social Media Product Strategy Consultant @ Rosenfeld Media Jan 2013 – Jan 2018 Social Media Strategy Development Are you creating (or rebooting) a social media (user generated content) strategy for your web or mobile application? I can lead your product design and management team though the muddy waters of "social media" and "gamification". My most popular engagement format is a multi-day onsite workshop (with remote followup) - where we dissect your business value, technical assets, and product design to produce a clear, actionable roadmap for your new social strategy. This effort often leads to the creation/discovery of of unique IP, giving your product a leg-up on the competition. Identity, Reputation, and Social Engagement Design As the coauthor of the seminal book Building Web Reputation Systems, companies look to me to help (re)define their strategies around user identity, acquisition, reputation, and incentives. My extensive background in software engineering and product design provide the and idea foundation for detailed social feature designs, from theory to system architecture to practice. Intellectual Property Consulting For more than 35 years I've been innovating in all areas where people interact mediated by computers - online games, messaging systems, social networks, virtual worlds, virtual currencies/social gaming, mobile, etc. If I didn't invent it, I know who was doing what years before people could even patent software. Between my personal innovations (more than two dozen patents granted), and my long history with other developers, many legal firms look to me to help them understand the history of social media. This has brought me into some very well-known IP cases between (or involving) various Fortune 500 companies. Information I provided has been used to invalidate several patents, here and in the EU. ### Principal @ MSB Associates Jan 2008 – Jan 2013 C-level consultant (and and inventor) of all things Social Media: reputation systems, identity, abuse mitigation, security, multiuser games, virtual community management, avatars and virtual worlds. ### CEO @ Suddenly Social Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Los Altos, CA Co-founder and team catalyst for a stealth startup providing massively scalable multiuser realtime platform for social and mobile games. ### Author, Building Web Reputation Systems @ O'Reilly & Associates Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 Co-Author of O'Reilly & Associates/Yahoo! Press's book: Building Web Reputation Systems. http://www.buildingreputation.com/ ### Director, Community Strategy Analyst @ Yahoo! Jan 2003 – Jan 2008 - Co-creator of the YOS: Yahoo Open Strategy, being implemented now to socialize and open the Yahoo! front-doors (and client) experience. I was the strategist in charge of the Social Platforms components. - Expert on the design and deployment of reputation systems for community management. Designed the following deployed external and internal reputation systems: email spam senders, Y!Answers community moderation, content uploader, message-boards quality. - Internal and External Evangelist about online communities best practices and technologies. - Active in communities strategy including related M&A activity. Strong voice in Flickr aquisition. - Co-designer of next generation community products, including Yahoo! 360-Degrees. ### Sr. Product Engineer, State Application Framework @ State Software Jan 2001 – Jan 2003 - Served multiple roles on a tiny, 4-engineer team: product manager (SAF Solo and SAF Ensemble), server programmer, object designer, tools author, buildmeister, test suite designer, QA coordinator, and mentor to junior programmers. - Created a portable JavaScript-based testing platform and test suite for regression and large-scale tests of a distributed computing platform, which was employed at Sun - Developed, from scratch, corporate build environment, including special tools to auto-generate print documentation from source code. - Designed, authored, documented, and packaged several extensions to the State Application Framework, including Web Services and email. ### Founder, Chief World Builder, and VP Services @ Communities.com Jan 1993 – Jan 2001 - Provided leadership for several teams of top tier engineers to design and create the Internet's only secure fully distributed 3D multi-user application platform for the web, leading to more than a half-dozen patents - Co-architect of two complete novel platforms, built from scratch - Managed the Communities Group and end-user Customer Support Department through net-based product testing cycles and on through extended product lifetimes - Designed and directed the creation of dozens of net-based multi-user experiences and implemented the distributed object model architecture - Acted as interim head of Operations, Engineering, and QA during staff turnover - Headed the development team that created WorldsAway for Fujitsu Cultural Technologies. Acted as project architect, producer, designer, evangelist, manager, and lead object coder. ### Sr. Software Engineer @ The American Information Exchange (AMiX) Jan 1988 – Jan 1992 - Lead AMiX's PC client software design and implementation team - Designed and implemented the worlds first email-based consulting system, a platform independent user interface, and automated testing frameworks ### Software Engineer @ Lucasfilm Games Jan 1984 – Jan 1988 - Designed and implemented the Lucasfilm’s Habitat/Q-Link’s Club Caribe client software (excluding the rendering engine) - Managed the world’s first “cyberspace” (AKA Avatar world) during it’s initial 3 year beta test - Designed, created, implemented, and operationally tested the first multiuser graphical adventures (using Habitat) ## Education ### BS in inc., Instructional Psychology University of San Francisco ### Certificate in Software Engineering Macomb Community College ### High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/frandallfarmer - Portfolio: http://spritely.institute --- Source: https://flows.cv/frandallfarmer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/frandallfarmer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13