Six Apart News & Events: January 2008

A few months ago, we announced that we were opening the social graph and invited others to join us. An effort like that encompasses many different technology projects and all kinds of different companies; in just a few months the idea of opening up social networks has received a lot of attention. Today we're excited to share an amazing new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web and we're the first to bring this sort of functionality to free and open source blogging tools...but I'm getting ahead of myself. It's worth revisiting some of the successes the openness movement has accomplished in just the past few months:

• Google's OpenSocial released new versions of its APIs and we hosted a wildly successful hackathon to help support the creation of new widgets for the standard.
• OpenID 2.0 shipped and both Google and Yahoo! are now supporting OpenID, bringing hundreds of millions of new IDs to the community.
• The group DataPortability.org was formed and released a video reinforcing these themes around openness.
• And finally, we've made good on our promise to let you show off all the services you belong to, with TypePad and Vox automatically letting you list your accounts around the web on your blogs using Microformats to link to your profiles. And as of today, the same ability is available for Movable Type.

Vox, TypePad and Movable Type now all bring profile expression to the motion of blogging.

Taking the Next Step

Blogging has always been about publishing and expression, but it is still evolving when it comes to richer communication. For example, when we speak aloud, we also communicate through more subtle cues like body language, facial expressions or gestures. In short, our actions add important context and nuance to our words. So we want to bring the meaning, expression, and emotion of these actions to blogging.

Today, we're shipping the next step in our vision of openness -- the Action Streams plugin -- an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web. Now of course, there are some social networking services that have similar features, but if you're using one of today's hosted services to share your actions it's quite possible that you're giving up either control over your privacy, management of your identity or profile, or support for open standards. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions, which is the kind of privacy control that we demonstrated when we were the only partners to launch a strictly opt-in version of Facebook Beacon. Right now, no one has shipped a robust and decentralized complement to services like Facebook's News Feed, FriendFeed, or Plaxo Pulse. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren't trapped in any one service. Open and decentralized implementations of these technologies are important to their evolution and adoption, based on our experiences being involved in creating TrackBack, Atom, OpenID, and OAuth. And we hope others join us as partners in making this a reality.

This is also a story of an individual's actions having an amazing impact. The initial development of these new features was started by Mark Paschal, a Movable Type engineer and long-time member of the MT community, during one of our weekly hackathons. It's a really satisfying example of how a good idea can go from a brainstorm to a real shipping product extremely quickly. (And is even cooler if you remember that we're hiring.) Because Activity Streams is a completely free and open source framework that is extensible, it's easy for any coder to contribute to the project with your own improvements. Just join the MTOS mailing list to become part of the Movable Type Open Source community and start hacking with the team that's created the platform. Mark writes more about building the Action Streams plugin on MovableType.org, the open technologies it uses, and how third-party developers can further extend it.

Getting In On The Action

If you already have a Movable Type blog, it's pretty straightforward to add your action stream to your site. You can already see it in action on a number of sites, like Movable Type's Product Manager Byrne Reese's personal blog who shares his thoughts on how Action Streams is "Blogging Evolved". If you're not yet running Movable Type, you can grab all of this functionality for free with Movable Type Open Source which just shipped its first stable release. You can see a completely free implementation on our Open Platforms Tech Lead David Recordon's site as well as on our VP of Product Michael Sippey's site. The plugin also ships with a Template Set (a new feature in MT 4.1) which allows you to create an action stream in just a few clicks. And all of this functionality is available today, for free, with the Movable Type Action Streams plugin.

There are even cooler possibilities with this new plugin when working with communities. If you power a community with Movable Type and want to aggregate activities of your authors, you can publish a summary of the whole community's activity. We've setup a demonstration of community activity aggregation running on MovableType.org right now. While the plugin today provides action streams for authors within Movable Type, you can imagine the possibilities in the future with all of your users in Movable Type Community Solution.

As we explained half a year ago, we're on a mission. Like we said then, blogs change the way we communicate. Just like with TrackBack, OpenID, opening the social graph, and so much else in blogging, we're hoping that we can influence everyone else to follow our lead and move blogging forward with us. Bringing your actions around the web under your control is a fundamental next step to making all of our blogs even more powerful and expressive.

It's been less than three years since the OpenID initiative first launched, and today we can note than more than one-third of a billion identities have been enabled. That's thanks to some amazing news today: Yahoo has announced that its nearly 250 million users will be able to start using their Yahoo identities as OpenID identities starting on January 30. (Check out the press release for more details.) Obviously, we've been excited about OpenID from day one, even hosting a hackathon this past weekend to see what new and cool things can be built on top of the technology. But some milestones feel even more significant than just representing a new feature; This milestone is about turning the corner from an OpenID being something that you might have to an OpenID being something that your site's users probably do have. If they have an AIM name or an AOL login, if they've got a TypePad or Vox or LiveJournal or WordPress blog, and now if they've ever signed up for a Yahoo or Flickr account, then the members of your community have an OpenID to use. Yahoo's even got a simple and well-designed guide to explain OpenID to its users. It's not just about easier site registration or the security of not sharing your password with everyone, though those are of course great benefits. This effort has been about having a new technology as a base for inventing cool new abilities around identity and authentication. Or put more simply, we believe that you should be able to control your identity online without being tied to any one company, site, or technology. Just a few years ago, that sounded like an idealistic but impractical idea. Today, it's a reality for hundreds of millions of people. Yahoo!

At Six Apart, every Wednesday is hack day -- our coders spend all day working on projects that they think are interesting, valuable, or just plain cool. (As we, ahem, explain on our jobs page -- we are hiring.) So we're used to having lots of people sitting on the shared couches in the middle of our San Francisco office, eating pizza and cranking out code. And when we hosted the OpenID hackathon this weekend, we thought we got a pretty good turnout, with about 50 people joining us over the 2 or 3 days, with as many as 30 folks here at a time. There were some great results, too, as you can see on the OpenID blog, or by looking at photos of the event. But today caught us a little off guard -- there's almost a hundred new people in our office today, hacking on OpenSocial. And the official OpenSocial hackathon event doesn't even officially start until 4pm! Thanks to the incredible efforts of the entire OpenSocial community, including our own David Recordon, who's led this effort from the Six Apart side, we've had a great turnout so far today, with even more people scheduled to join later this afternoon and evening. The truth is, compared to our bigger neighbors who've hosted similar hackathons in the past (Adobe's got a building just a few blocks away, the old Macromedia offices) as well as the giants like Google and Yahoo down in Silicon Valley, we're tiny. For example, right now, we've got more people who aren't Six Apart employees in the office than people who are. We actually had to crank up the air conditioning to account for all the extra people! (Thanks to Garth for the photo.) But what's really cool is that there's a legitimate camaraderie and desire to make things work. And that means that really, almost anybody can step up and help contribute to getting things made. It's a heartening sign that, despite how cynical some of us get about the hype about "Web 2.0" or whatever, there are some times when little companies and individual contributors can have just as much to contribute as some of the biggest companies in the tech world. Best of all, things are just getting underway -- swing by our San Francisco offices at 548 Fourth Street to join us today if you're hacking. Our tradition at Six Apart is to have each hacker demonstrate their best hacks at the end of the day, so everyone present can vote on what's coolest. We're sure today will be the most impressive set of demos yet.

As is usual on any day when Apple has a MacWorld keynote speech, everybody's been focused on the new hardware and software that's launched. But there's another new little detail for web developers to keep track of, too -- webclip icons. Webclip icons are a lot like favicons, but instead of showing up in your browser's address bar or bookmarks, they show up as custom icons on the homepage of an iPhone or iPod touch when someone adds your site to their device's homepage. The good news, is, long-time MT community member Dan Dickinson has done the homework of how to make these new icons. The basic steps are pretty easy:

* Create a 45x45 PNG. * Name it "apple-touch-icon.png" * Throw it in the root folder of your website. (Not the root of your server, the root of your web documents.)

Dan then goes into more details on how to use a link tag for more customization, as well as details about the optimal image sizes to use. There's also a hat tip to ProNet member Neil Epstein, tech director for the formidable MT-powered publishing efforts at Gothamist, for chipping in with more info on how to get your webclip icons perfected.

The good folks over at NewsGator have just announced that their really awesome feed readers are now free for personal use. Take a look at the list of products, and you'll see some of the best software that's you can get for feed reading: * FeedDemon for Windows * NetNewsWire for the Mac * NewsGator Go! for Blackberries, Windows Mobile or Java phones * NewsGator Inbox for Outlook And all of these apps sync with NewsGator's online feed-reading service. What's cool is that we've known the developers of each of these client applications from the days when, like Movable Type, their apps were made as a labor of love for geeks and serious bloggers. And just like we have at Six Apart, they've grown into a lot of different markets with different products, learning a lot along the way. So it's a smart next step -- they are making their personal products free to focus on business and enterprise users who want to pay for more advanced features. Sound familiar? That's the same path we went on with Movable Type, making MT free for personal use, with paid users getting more help or features, and enterprise users getting lots of powerful features that make sense for that audience. Plus, once you get hooked on these kinds of tools at home, it's easy to recommend using them at work. We're glad to see a fellow old-school social media company going down a similar path to the one we've followed, and we're excited to grab some of our favorite apps for free. To find out more about the announcement, check out the official word on NewsGator's TypePad-powered blog.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: You should be able to control your data. And your data isn't just the words you write, or the photos you take, but the relationships and connections you make online.

There's been a debate over these ideas for years now, and the new year has been greeted by a variation on the conversation about data privacy and ownership. This time, it's been prompted by well-known blogger Robert Scoble's Facebook account being shut down, at least temporarily, due to his use of an application designed to connect his Facebook friends with his address book by programatically extracting his personal relationship information from Facebook. The application is a still-in-development feature from the folks at Plaxo, who have been working a great deal on open data portability through their efforts around the Plaxo Pulse service. In the course of extracting this information, Plaxo's development version of their script caused an unusually high amount of activity on Scoble's account, and may have violated Facebook's terms of service about using automated scripts to retrieve data from the service.

With the basic facts out of the way, a few important points are worth highlighting:

• The issue here isn't about Facebook or Plaxo -- we've talked to lots of people at both companies over the years, and they generally want to do the right thing, if possible. The issue is how we make it possible for all of us to control our own data while maintaining privacy.
• There is often a tension between best practices around privacy/security and the ability to make data portable, even one's own data.
• Most average people don't (yet) know that they even want to have data portability -- though they are taking advantage of portability daily when they find their friends by importing their address book.
• It is hard to focus on issues like usability and user experience when everyone is still figuring out ways to make data portable.
• The privacy issues surrounding your friends' data still aren't clear. Even if you can manually write down their email address, does that give you the right to programatically export it into another service?

From those points, you can figure out some really specific examples of why things are so broken right now. For example, Facebook is screwed either way -- if they keep their current policy of prohibiting third-party scripts from bulk-extracting this kind of data, they'll get beaten up for being too closed and proprietary. But if they allow these types of scripts, they are just as likely to get beaten up on privacy grounds, for permitting or encouraging you to enter your login and password information on third-party sites. Either way, it's an ugly headline, and neither scenario serves users well.

Plaxo's in a bind, too -- this is a great feature, since it makes their Pulse service more valuable and makes their users happy. But having to hang on to a bunch of people's Facebook passwords is a liability, and means having the burden of a big responsibility that just sucks time away from interesting things like adding new features. And Plaxo's feature relies on scraping data, which isn't just against the Facebook terms of service, but is the Wrong Way of doing the Right Thing.

But just like OpenSocial isn't about Google or Facebook, the debate over personal relationship data isn't about Facebook or Plaxo, it's about giving you more control over your information.

First-Hand Experience

We've been through this a bit ourselves and put a lot of thought into it. For example, on Vox, we recently added the ability to invite or search for your friends using your email address book. Lots of other services do this, and we could have only done what everybody did and said "throw your Hotmail or Gmail password in here and we'll do the rest"; and that option is there. But, for example, your Google account, which connects to your Gmail address book, can also be connected to your bank account through Google Checkout, or even your social security number through an AdSense account. So, that latest social network you tried out because it got linked on TechCrunch? You might have trusted them to not grab your entire identity -- hope you read the security policy!

Now, our security policies are sound -- we don't store your login information at all and use SSL when you give it to us. And fortunately, we've been in business long enough that people can judge our track record on privacy policies. But we also wanted to come up with the ideal solution: A way to let you import your address book without giving away your passwords. The super high-tech solution we settled on? Plain old CSV files. CSV stands for comma-separated values, and it's the most basic, stupid-simple way of exchanging things like address lists. Now you can easily export stuff that way from Outlook or Gmail or Yahoo or almost anything else without having to give us any of your login information. It's just another example of how thinking through the little details makes it easier to do the right thing.

In the future, though, simple formats like CSV just might not be good enough. As we said when we launched the relationship update stream, we believe that most sites want to do the right thing ‚there just haven't been tools available to make that possible. So in the future, reusing existing open formats like FOAF, XFN, OPML, APML, and hCard, along with open protocols like OpenID and OAuth, will make it easy for all of us to take our data, and our friends, with us wherever we go. This is why we're so excited to participate in efforts like DataPortability.org and see Google, Plaxo, and Facebook join the effort too. That said, follow through is extremely important.

For Next Time

There will inevitably be another recycling of this conversation in the future. Don't let the usual suspects turn it into a "this company vs. that company" story -- whether it's us at Six Apart or the people at Google or Facebook or Microsoft or anywhere else, the companies are not what matters. What matters is that there are some great new things we'll all be able to do on the web once all of the services we use let us control our own information.

Attention hackers: If you live in San Francisco, or if you'll be in town for Macworld next week, you're invited to join an OpenSocial hackathon at the Six Apart offices in San Francisco.

Next Wednesday, the 16th, members of the Six Apart and LiveJournal teams, along with representatives from Google, will be hosting an OpenSocial hackathon (see OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People) at our office in San Francisco. A few weeks ago, version 0.6 of the OpenSocial API was released and this hackathon will give you the chance to work with developers from Six Apart, Google, MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, and others on building OpenSocial gadgets and containers. If you've been wondering how to get started with OpenSocial and can make it to San Francisco (or will already be in town for Macworld), then this is the evening for you. You can find out more and RSVP on Upcoming.

Brent Leary and his business partner and co-host Michael Thomas are recognized experts in the field of Customer Relationship Management, with a vibrant consulting business, a web site, a TypePad blog, and a radio show that focus on technologies for small businesses. This week Brent and Michael interview our own David Recordon about the social networking landscape, OpenSocial, Facebook Beacon, OpenID, and how Six Apart tools help to create successful online communities.

The interview with David provides a good overview of recent developments in the social tool space, and what's to come in 2008. David summarizes Six Apart's involvement in the various open initiatives and how they directly benefit users of Six Apart products. (Hint: User control over sharing activities on the web is of highest importance.)

In the second half of the thirty-minute show, Brent, Michael, and David talk about how technology is changing how we communicate at home and at work -- even how David talks to his own mother. You can find the
official show online as well as a post by Brent with more of his thoughts on the show.

Brent has previously interviewed Six Apart CEO Chris Alden and Chief Evangelist Anil Dash about small business blogging.