Six Apart News & Events: Labs

This morning one of our interns finished up one of his hackathon projects (every Wednesday is hack day -- our coders spend all day working on projects that they think are interesting, valuable, or just plain cool. And yes, we are hiring) which is a Perl library to create new hCards and parse existing ones from around the web. The Microformat hCard describes how to represent people, companies, organizations, and places by using a 1:1 representation of vCard properties and values in HTML. When developing this library, we focused on making sure that it worked with hCards in the wild -- including those that might not fully follow the specification -- and making sure that you didn't need to already know how hCard worked to make use of the library.

Some more information from the library's README:

This module handles three existing specifications from Microformats.org:

1. hCard -- http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
2. adr -- http://microformats.org/wiki/adr
3. geo -- http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

Each of them can be used on their own (hCard uses adr and geo to parse addresses and geolocations, but adr and geo have no dependencies on any others, and hCard doesn't need either unless the corresponding elements appear in an hCard), though the primary appearance of adr and geo "in the wild" is as subparts of hCards.

This module exists both to parse existing hCards from web pages, and to create new hCards so that they can be put onto the Internet.

To use it to parse an existing hCard (or hCards), simply give it the content of the page containing them (there is no need to first eliminate extraneous content, as the module will handle that itself):

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

If you would like to get all the hCards on the webpage, simply ask using an array:

my @cards = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

The module respects nested hCards using the parsing rules defined in the spec, so if one hCard contains another, it will return one hCard with the other held in the relevant subpart, rather than two top-level hCards.

To create a new hCard, first create the new object:

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->new;

Then use the helper methods to add any data you would like. When you're ready to output the hCard, simply write:

my $output = $card->to_hcard;

And $output will be filled with an hCard representation, using tags exclusively with the relevant class names.

If you would like to have the parser determine the representative hCard for a page, simply pass the page's URL as an additional parameter to the parse or from_tree methods, and the appropriate property will be found if it can be determined.

Check it out on CPAN and let us know what you think.

Blogging is evolving, to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web, merging publishing with community. Movable Type users know this better than anyone, since they get first and best access to the coolest social publishing features.

Today marks another milestone, as our own David Recordon joined Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Facebook's F8 conference to demonstrate a live, working implementation of Facebook Connect for Movable Type. Facebook Connect is a powerful new initiative from Facebook that lets you bring your Facebook profile and social graph to other applications and websites while still giving you full control over privacy. We've shown off (and will soon release for download) a free, open source plugin for Movable Type that enables Facebook Connect on any MT-powered site.

Simply put, this is another huge leap forward in the effort to make the personal web more open.

Facebook users who visit Movable Type-powered sites using these new features will see a number of significant benefits:

• You can sign in with your existing Facebook account, without the compelexity of creating a new account on a site.
• If you choose, your Facebook profile name and picture can automatically be shared with the Movable Type site you're visiting.
• All of these capabilties take place without you having to share your password with any other sites.
• Facebook Connect for Movable Type honors your privacy, so that no one else will see your information from Facebook unless you've given then permission from within Facebook.
• Facebook Connect makes it possible to tell your friends on Facebook where you're participating on the web, by updating your News Feed.
• As Facebook brings new capabilities onilne with Facebook Connect, Movable Type sites will be able to provide them to you seamlessly.

Of course, this doesn't just benefit the members of a site's community, there are some huge benefits for those of you who manage and publish Movable Type-powered sites, too.

• It's easier than ever to get new visitors to your site to register and participate, increasing engagement and encouraging repeat visits.
• Community members can advertise their participation on your site using the Facebook News Feed, driving traffic and new visitors to your site.
• You can require sign-in via Facebook Connect or OpenID or other systems, knowing that most active users on the web have an account with one of these systems already.
• Site visitors are more likely to participate if they see familiar avatars and names from their friends on your site.
• You can manage community members who sign in through Facebook Connect using the same familiar tools you use today -- even on your iPhone.

This kind of open connection between social networks and blogs benefits everyone. Publishers get more visitors and engagement on their sites, Facebook members get to discover more dynamic conversations going on across the web, and everyone gets a better user experience that honors their privacy.

For years now, we've invested in connecting Movable Type sites to the rest of the web. Millions of people visit a Movable Type-powered site or community every day, and they benefit from our work to make the web better. There are initiatives like OpenID, which has grown from its genesis at Six Apart to being part of the fabric of the web, with over half a billion accounts now being able to sign in to your Movable Type-powered community without having to create a new login. (We hope to see Facebook Connect support OpenID soon, too -- that would mean even less work for sites which already accept OpenID.)

We committed to bringing social networking capabilities to any site that wants them with the enormous success of our Community Solution for Movable Type, which turns any MT-powered site into a complete social platform. This was amplified by efforts like Action Streams, which from its launch at the beginning of this year has exploded with support for sharing activity from dozens of social networks, offering aggregation of social networking activity from more sources than any other platform. And the web has seen immediate benefits from projects like TypePad AntiSpam, designed to be a free way to combat blog spam anywhere on the web, on any platform.

Today, this tradition is demonstrated again by bringing Facebook Connect to Movable Type. Like Movable Type itself, it's available for free and will be released under an open source license. And like all of these efforts to make blogging more social, Facebook Connect is available first and exclusively for Movable Type.

As we get closer to the availability of Facebook Connect, we'll explain the technical details of implementation, as well as offering an overview of the experience that community members and site owners can expect. In the meantime, you'll want to grab the latest release candidate of Movable Type 4.2, due to be released shortly, and featuring massive performance improvements and far simpler templating in addition to support for the Facebook Connect plugin.

Ever since Ben and Mena Trott created Movable Type together so that Mena could blog and build a community, Six Apart has been about helping to get more people blogging. In order to do this we must produce optimized user experiences that take cutting edge technology and make it more accessible. We've been fortunate enough be recognized for our efforts in innovation and today we're introducing a free web application, Blog It for iPhone Powered by TypePad. Built specifically for iPhone's Safari browser, Blog It for iPhone enables you to post blog entries or status updates from wherever you are to more than a dozen different online services.

Blog It for iPhone is essentially the mobile version of our Blog It for Facebook application, which we launched in April. We've been thrilled with the response to Blog It for Facebook (see this ReadWriteWeb post for an example!), and love seeing people use it to create content and share it all over the web. And we also love making it better -- in May we added support for MarkDown so you don't need to write HTML by hand; and in June we added support for FriendFeed and Jaiku, to bring the total list of services we support to thirteen. Blog It now supports creating content on Blogger, Facebook, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad Vox, WordPress.com, and any WordPress.org site.

Blog It: Free blogging to any platform, from any iPhone

The Blog It for iPhone web application lets you post to your blog and update your status via one easy-to-use interface. Just like the original version for Facebook, you can choose to automatically share your post with people you know on various social networks. And Blog It for iPhone supports all the same services Blog It for Facebook does. To use Blog It for iPhone simply visit blogit.typepad.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

It's so easy that you don't even need to create yet another account; we've integrated OpenID for login to Blog It for iPhone. Our designers worked hard to try to keep it simple so that even if you don't know what OpenID is you'll still be able to just login with your account from Yahoo!. This also means that once you've chosen to link your accounts together, all of your existing settings from Blog It for Facebook will automatically show up on your iPhone and any changes you make will be reflected no matter where you use Blog It.

The Blog It for iPhone web application joins our existing iPhone-optimized TypePad site which we launched last year. TypePad bloggers can visit i.typepad.com from their iPhone to manage comment activity, create and publish simple blog posts and even check on site traffic statistics. To our beloved Movable Type users, we've heard you loud and clear: Blog It is a great way to post to Movable Type from your iPhone, or if you want even more features, you can check out the iMT plugin, which lets you manage your whole Movable Type blog from the device.

To round out blogging support for the iPhone, a native iPhone application for TypePad will be available for free at the launch of the iPhone App Store. TypePad for iPhone enables bloggers to instantly post photos from their iPhone to their blogs and photo albums on TypePad. Michael Sippey, Six Apart's VP of Products, demonstrated this new app during the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Check out the video of the event; his demo starts at about the 30 minute mark.

We're certainly excited about all of the great new things we can provide to bloggers because of the iPhone's great web browser and powerfully simple SDK for native applications. Below are some screenshots of the new free Blog It for iPhone web application, and you can access it from Safari on your iPhone at blogit.typepad.com.

At Six Apart, our mission is to help people communicate on the web, and we've always done this by making the best software and services that we can. But part of our larger goal is to help do what's right for the web, and today we're launching the latest initiative in that effort: TypePad AntiSpam.

What's TypePad AntiSpam? A few short answers:

• A free, open source system powered by TypePad for blocking comment spam on any site, free no matter how many comments you get.
• A service for all bloggers, built into TypePad blogs already and implemented as a free plugin for users of platforms like Movable Type and WordPress.
• An open source engine which developers can use to create new antispam services, with customizable rules and logic.
• In beta! We're hearing great results from testers so far, but wanted to open up TypePad AntiSpam to a larger audience so we can make sure the system is getting as smart as possible.

One of the reasons that we think TypePad AntiSpam is performing so well already is that its adaptive learning engine has been trained by millions of comments already. Every time any TypePad user reports a comment as junk, the system gets a little bit smarter and is even more ready to fight future spam attacks. The same goes for TrackBacks and Pingbacks.

• TypePad AntiSpam is a free, automatic upgrade for TypePad users at any subscription level -- it's built in! You can read up on Everything TypePad to find out how this helps your TypePad blogs and be sure to check out the screencast.
• The service is included in the brand-new Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 and is available as a free plugin for any user of MT 3.3 or later.
• For users of other platforms, TypePad AntiSpam is a free plugin. Users of WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 can download the plugin for free, and other platforms can use our 100% Akismet API-compatible implementation to extend their existing antispam support to use this service.

So, why are we releasing TypePad AntiSpam now? It all comes back to our mission, as stated above: We want to increase the quality of conversation on the web. At the highest level, we wanted to change the economics of blog spamming by introducing variety into the ecosystem.

The more different implementations of spam-fighting technology that exist, the more complex and challenging (and expensive!) it becomes for spammers to keep attacking our communities. At the same time, we want to make sure our economic incentives at Six Apart as a business are aligned with the best interests of bloggers, so that we feel the pain and cost of spam just as you do. And we want to get these weapons in the fight against spammers into as many hands as possible. One of the earliest sites to deploy the new platform has been popular tech blog TechCrunch, which just offered up a review of TypePad AntiSpam from the site's founder, Michael Arrington:

[L]ast week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I'm pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

TypePad AntiSpam has learned from the platforms that came before: Automattic's team has created a dead-simple API for Akismet, and we're 100% compatible with their API. (As Dave Winer once said, "Invention here is hardly the issue. What matters is adoption and forward motion.") The smart work at Defensio has made it clear that bloggers want more competition in the antispam market. And years of work on SpamAssassin has shown the success of making an open source antispam engine that anyone can extend and customize to their own needs.

But most important, we made TypePad AntiSpam so that you don't have to think about spam. So grab the plugin (or TypePad users, just keep on blogging) and join the fight against blog spam.

First, we brought all your social networks to your blog with Action Streams. Today, we start to complete the circle.

Ever stopped to think about how many places on the web you post about your life? For many of us, we're posting on multiple blogs, as well as Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. That's a lot of time spent just to make sure all of our friends and family across the web are caught up on our lives. And while it's incredibly important to stay connected to everyone, at Six Apart, we don't think it should have to be quite so complicated to do so. That is why tonight we've taken another step in our ongoing effort to create better tools for bloggers, no matter what publishing platforms you use. We want to make blogging better for everyone.

We are excited to launch the first cross-platform blogging application for Facebook -- Blog It Powered by TypePad. We think Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook and tell people you know all around the web that you're doing so. It doesn't matter if you blog using our products or not; we support bloggers on Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com and WordPress.org!

Plus, after you've posted using Blog It, you can choose to automatically share your post via Twitter and Pownce, in addition to the Facebook Newsfeed. While a lot of other Facebook applications rely solely on the Newsfeed to share your activity, we think that Blog It is unique in that it helps you tell everyone you know across the web about what you're creating, not just your Facebook friends. Bloggers, such as our own Alex Deve, have seen a significant increase in traffic when they tell their friends on Twitter about their new posts.

Ready to try it out? Just add the Blog It application on Facebook and take a minute to setup your blogs. From there you can create new blog posts and share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce all just by checking a few extra boxes. Or if you're not convinced yet then sit back, break out the pop corn and watch this short movie...

You can learn more about Blog It at http://www.typepad.com/features/blogit.html or read the press release we'll be putting out in the morning.

I've been interested in geo-location stuff for a long time now. Even back in 2003, when we launched TypePad, we built in support for parsing photo EXIF data to look for latitude and longitude embedded by a camera or mobile phone. Of course, at the time, only a couple of phone models in Japan, as well as (apparently) high-end digital cameras, could record GPS data on photos taken by the device.

A couple of years later, I bought a GPS device, connected it over Bluetooth to my mobile phone, and wrote some server software to track my location; I also wrote Python client software for my phone (hooray for Python for s60!) to take a photo, collect my current location, and send the whole mess up to my TypePad moblog.

There were a number of problems with every setup I've ever tried, though, ranging from the setup being too clunky (I quickly tired of carrying around a GPS device) to not wanting to share my location in detail with the entire world. Most importantly, though, was that there just wasn't much I could do with the data, once I had it: I could map it, but it wasn't hooked in to my online identity in any useful way.

So I was really excited last week to see the launch of Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle service, which is simple, privacy-aware, and most importantly, is now hooked in to Movable Type, using the new Fire Eagle plugin for MT. This makes my MT profile location-aware: I can add a map of my current location; changes to my location are added to my Action Stream; and other MT plugins can build off of the location to provide additional location-sensitive features. You can see it in action -- combined with the Action Stream plugin -- on David's site.

Another interesting aspect of the Fire Eagle API is that it uses the new OAuth standard for all API requests. We've written about OAuth in the past and are really excited to see Yahoo! supporting it. To help do our part in the adoption of this open standard, we'll be shipping the Perl OAuth library with the next release of Movable Type so that no plugin developer needs to worry if they'll be able to develop atop OAuth with MT.

If you need a Fire Eagle invite, leave a comment and we'll email you one.

We take design incredibly seriously at Six Apart -- the challenge of understanding constraints and working within them to make something beautiful, the thrill of seeing a final product that "just works", and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that you chose substance over flash and it worked out for the best. Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox provide hundreds of themes and styles ranging from something professional to something intricately elaborate, with many customizable choices in between. We do this to give you freedom of expression and complete control over your blog.

All of that is in the back of our heads when we think about how our tools can advance the state of design on the web. Forgive the cliché, but we don't want to just give people a fish, we want to teach them how to fish. It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.

So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.

It's similar, in a lot of ways, to the thought 37signals puts into the so-called "blank slate" state for their applications. When you start out using their services and haven't yet entered any data, the tools provide illustrations of what they'll look like in actual use which get you in the right mindset. We know there's an opportunity to get people who are just thinking "I need to pick a theme" to think in the mindset of a designer.

Movable Type was the first blogging platform to popularize CSS-based designs and are proud to count many of the world's most talented and influential designers as members of our community. But we're just as interested in getting people who've never consciously thought about web design to make a first step towards appreciating one of the greatest things blogs have brought to the web: An appreciation for design.

Alright, designers: What should we add to the Assistant? We're going to be evolving the tool rapidly based on your feedback, bringing these capabilities to TypePad members and adding a wide range of new functionality. Your input is going to help us choose where we go next. You can also read more about it on MovableType.org.

I started blogging on Movable Type in 2002 -- and began a long love affair with the product that has helped transform the world of blogging, and the world blogging touches. I remember that sense of both freedom and control that I felt when I realized how easy online publishing could really be for an individual. When I came to Six Apart in 2006 I had the privilege of being put in charge of the Movable Type group. And now as CEO, I get to continue that work, which makes it even more important to explain not just where we've been, but where we're going.

A Re-Commitment to Movable Type

Despite the continued growth of the Movable Type platform, the hard work of the brilliant people on the MT team, and the dedicated community of MT bloggers and developers, when I joined the company MT was confronting a host of challenges from within and without Six Apart. From within, new projects, such as TypePad and Vox, captured some of the internal attention that MT once had, new OSS blog platforms such as WordPress had been gaining traction in some parts of the blogosphere, and Movable Type, while always a platform suitable for individuals, had been distinguishing itself on the high-end while leaving many with the impression that Six Apart didn't care about the individual blogger. This was never true, but the challenge of making a blogging platform both sufficiently easy to use and powerful is certainly significant. In fact, I don't think any blogging or CMS platform has succeeded in combining the ultimate in ease-of-use with the ultimate in power -- yet.

So, back in 2006, we made some decisions. First and foremost, we were going to compete. MT has brought more to blogging than any platform in history -- it was the first professional grade blogging platform (when it launched) and the first enterprise grade blogging platform (with MT Enterprise) -- but in 2006 it was time to double down or take the chips off the table.

We decided to bet on the future.

Central to this effort is Movable Type 4, a completely re-thought version of the software designed to address the way the web and social media have changed in the past half-decade. We wanted to improve the ease of use, the user interface, the installation process, and the content & community management capabilities. We also greatly enhanced our advanced capabilities, launching an Enterprise Solution, making MT unrivaled in its power for large customers who need to run large numbers of blogs integrated with enterprise systems, and the Community Solution, which we believe makes MT the leader in the emerging "CCMS" space (community content management systems) for which we have seen huge market demand.

And Movable Type has always been about freedom, but this was another fundamental tenet that may have become less clear along the way. Despite the fact that Six Apart has always been a major contributor to open source software, and MT itself is built largely on top of OSS, there was no fully open source version of MT. There was a disconnect between our intentions and the decisions we'd made about promoting and distributing Movable Type, and it was hurting us and the community. MT had relied on its innovations to move it forward -- after all, that's what put us on the map. But conversations about distribution and licensing should never overshadow the more important ideas of openness and innovation.

Six Apart has been, and will continue to be, the most innovative blog company around. In addition to MT taking personal, professional, enterprise, and now community blogging where no platform had taken it before, Six Apart also released TypePad, the first high-end hosted blogging platform and TypePad Business Class, the first business class professional blogging platform. Vox was the first social blogging platform, deeply combining social networking and blogging before anyone else and starting a category that is now growing along with peers like Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, and more. Six Apart is where TrackBack and OpenID were invented, and we're the stewards of some of the major technologies that power today's biggest Internet sites, such as Memcached (which is used by Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, and many more), Perbal, MogileFS, and DJabberd. We've been involved as founding supporters in initiatives such as the Atom protocol, OAuth, and OpenSocial.

We see all of these projects as part of an effort to make the entire web more open, and to give individuals more control.

What's next for MT

Sometimes we've felt a little like Apple was a few years ago -- inventing insanely great stuff but at times outfoxed on the distribution front. A major component of our strategy to fight back and serve the broader market was MT Open Source, which was released in January. This is a huge milestone for Six Apart and MT, and we believe for blogging itself. We've always been more focused on freedom - empowering our bloggers to do whatever they desire -- than on "free", but they aren't mutually exclusive.

But we aren't stopping there.

As mentioned above, I don't think anyone has successfully created a blogging platform that's both extremely easy and extremely powerful. Some might even say that these objectives are inherently at odds. We disagree. While we made great usability advances in MT4, we realize that there is more for us to do in terms of making it easier to get, install and use MT, and we are making a firm commitment to make MT not only the most powerful platform, but the easiest.

Now let me say some words to the whole blogging community, and not just the Six Apart community. Even if you never have or never will use a Six Apart product or service for your blogging, even if you are the most ardent WordPress supporter, you ought to rejoice in the fact that Six Apart and Movable Type are going to push, push, push the art and science of blogging forward and that we are committed to making blogging powerful and easy. While we have competed, MT and WP have helped each other in a fundamental way -- we by introducing blogging features and capabilities that they have not, and they by making blogging simpler and easier to use where we have not. A healthy competition will help BOTH platforms improve. And the winner is blogging itself, and everyone who blogs. Given the explosive stage of growth and evolution that we're seeing in blogging, we even have the chance to help the whole web benefit. So, even if you don't use our platform, we'll help keep your platform honest.

We thank you for more than six years of support for MT, and we hope you'll join us in continuing the successes we've seen with MT 4.1, MTOS, and the recent release of Action Streams. Just head over to movabletype.org to join the community.

On Friday, Google released an interesting new API called the "Social Graph API" which can be used to connect accounts online. The API is a concrete step in opening the social graph, and it is great to see Google demonstrating just how important decentralized social networks are as it really reinforces what we, Plaxo, the DiSo Project, and many others have been building. But we also wanted to highlight some of the complex issues of making social applications on the web that pop up with these kinds of initiatives -- issues that are especially important since some people (including danah boyd and ReadWriteWeb) have concerns about the privacy implications of Google's work.

We're excited about APIs to access social relationships online. But we're concerned that existing systems may result in ugly surprises when your relationships are available in a new or unexpected context. We think that access to the social graph must give individuals control over how and where their relationships are shared.

I've had many conversations with Brad Fitzpatrick (who joined Google last August to develop this API) about the work we're trying to accomplish at both of our companies, as you can see from the initial publication of the "Thoughts on the Social Graph" last year. When I re-joined Six Apart last August I started developing an open source service that would crawl online relationship data and expose it via an API. I showed snippets of it on my blog (pictures and text), gave a brief demo at the Data Sharing Summit, and even came close to releasing an online tool which visualized all of your accounts and friends; instead we opted for demonstrating its power with a screencast showing how you could use it to find your friends. While this implementation of the API was based on publicly discoverable information (like Google's), we simply didn't feel comfortable shipping that project based on current implementations.

Why not? Well, for us to be comfortable that we weren't doing any evil, we wanted to make sure that we first had a way to clearly explain to non-technical users a few important points:

• Where each point of data about relationships is coming from
• How to hide or control sharing of data on each service you use
• A way to prompt the services to update relationships when they change, to make sure they're up to date, as we prototyped along with Ma.gnolia in October

There are many more requirements we could add to this short list, but these seemed like fundamentals to make sure that people have a very high degree of control over their relationship data, and the current implementation of Google's Social Graph API falls a bit short. This is even more important, for example, when we learn in ReadWriteWeb's post on privacy concerns that Aber Whitcomb (CTO of MySpace) has said that Google's "API includes a custom mechanism to extract social connections between friends on MySpace." This means that Google isn't just using profile information designed to be aggregated, but is already willing to extract data as needed (much as Plaxo did to Robert Scoble's Facebook account) from services that don't explicitly share it. While Facebook easily blocked Plaxo's specific crawler, it seems extremely unlikely that MySpace would block Google. This is even more fraught becasue Google is likely basing this API on the data they collect when routinely crawling the web for their search engine. Controlling access to relationship data from a service should not require completely blocking all of Google's crawlers.

Don't get us wrong, having social networking become a feature of every application versus a product by itself will dramatically change the web for the better. Tim O'Reilly discusses this where he says "It's a lot like the evolutionary value of pain. Search creates feedback loops that allow us to learn from and modify our behavior. A false sense of security helps bad actors more than tools that make information more visible." Google's Social Graph API certainly is powerful and we intend to use it within our products (such as recommending accounts to add to your Action Streams) though will always balance our use with your privacy as we've always done in the past. But we do hope to kick-start a conversation about how we can all be given more control over the way our relationships are used.

The guiding principle here is one that Brad Fitzpatrick and many others have relied on many times: The Principle of Least Surprise. PoLS is one of the things that's always guided our work at Six Apart, and we've found that many of our biggest mistakes have come when we forget the lessons it teaches us. There's an obvious point of frustration or embarrassment that can arise from exposing our personal MySpace connections in a context where our professional LinkedIn contacts can see them, for example. The fact that much of this data could theoretically be discovered anyway isn't the point. Just as much of the information in Facebook's News Feed could have been discovered anyway, the fact that these relationships are being moved from "possible to find" to "easy to discover" means that we should be thinking of how this affects social behaviors in this new context.

And the truth is, we don't know the right answer. We're hoping to start a useful conversation in the community to help find the answers. That way, we can make sure everyone who benefits from these new social features finds them to be a pleasant surprise.