F. Randall "Randy" Farmer: Professional Background

I'm a husband, a father, a gamer, and a globally recognized pioneer of multi-player gaming, virtual worlds, and social media. For more than 30 years, I've been inventing and delivering powerful new methods to connect people with each other using computers and networks as the mediating technologies.

Professionally, I serve many roles simultaneously – Product Innovator,
Community Consultant, External Evangelist, and Scout.

• Product Innovator
• My most innovative product-related work spans a broad spectrum of platforms and applications. This multidisciplinary work has created hundreds of millions of dollars in value and spawned entire product categories. Here are some of the firsts I actively developed or led:
• Platforms: Message boards, fully-distributed virtual objects, very-large-scale reputation systems, AJAX application frameworks and services, and theYOS - Yahoo! Open Strategy – under development.
• Applications: Graphical MMOGs, avatars, virtual currencies, information markets, and I was lead social architect on Yahoo! 360° (for which I invented the social network feed and other often copied features), and Nexus – next generation Yahoo! Groups – under development
• I currently am listed as an inventor on five granted patents and have about ten that are pending:
• Issued: Virtual objects, multiplayer gaming, avatars, and social media.
• Pending: Social media, reputation systems, and mobile networking.
• Community Consultant
• Social media is still new to many organizations, and most first intuitions about how users will react to changes are strategically wrong. Classical product research doesn't accurately represent how people interact in these environments, leading to costly, and sometimes irrecoverable, product design errors. Product managers and user experience teams often need specialized help when creating new community/social media experiences. They need a community consultant to help them with their initial design iterations, community growth planning, and abuse mitigation design.
• I've played this role for my entire career - for large companies, governments, NGOs and startups. For Linden Labs, I consulted to create a more consumer-centric interface for Second Life, and they've implemented nearly all of my recommendations. For the Skoll and the George Lucas Educational Foundations I advised on strategy for selecting the right kinds of tools for their customers. For Yahoo! I traveled around the world to educate product and engineering teams on how to construct community infrastructure for success – which means for scale and for content quality.
• My community consulting sessions have been embraced enthusiastically by my clients, garnering praise such as “equivalent to a graduate level seminar” and “the best two hours of our project so far.”
• Evangelist and Scout
• Along with sharing social media best practices and innovation within an organization, there is a need to communicate insights and inventions to outside parties – sometimes to trade associations, affiliated entities, or to the public at large.
• I have published numerous papers and articles and co-author a blog on online communities and games. My comprehensive experience with the entire social media field provides ample opportunity to speak to the public as well as to the press as a no-nonsense voice on these technologies and their best practices.
• My widely recognized reputation in the field also provides me special access to emerging technologies and invitation-only conferences and meetings that have been critical to my employer's positioning as a thought-leader. For example, for Yahoo! I was instrumental in both the Flickr acquisition and the OpenID initiative.

I am currently part of the MSBit.com consultancy and am writing a book on Online Communities.

For a detailed employment history, extensive endorsements, and list of professional accomplishments, please see my LinkedIn résumé.