F. Randall “Randy” Farmer is
Community Strategist, Yahoo! Inc.
Randy brings his extensive experience to advise Yahoo!’s plans for developing and supporting online communities, focusing on next-generation identity/privacy, reputation and groups technologies and open APIs. For more than 30 years, he has been designing, building and managing online social media systems and related platform technologies. Randy co-created one of the first message boards, the first Star Trek multi-user (text) game, the first graphical virtual worlds with avatars and virtual currencies, the first online information marketplace, the first fully distributed virtual world platform (before P2P), the first no-plugin web session platform (before AJAX), and the Yahoo! 360° community service.
He has a deep interest in community and communication dynamics, identity and reputation systems, intellectual property issues, avatars and creativity, all wrapped up in a security blanket.
