Got email from David Recordon of Six Apart yesterday, alerting me to some news:
[from Six Apart - News and Events: Time for Action: What We’re Opening Next]
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.
David Sippey and Byrne Reese of Six Apart also add some insights:
[from Blogging Evolved by Byrne Reese]
But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control.
But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Because if there is one thing to learn from the one service that even remotely capable of performing this service for you, is that control and privacy is not just important, it is paramount. That is why this plugin:
- is 100% free and open source
- is available for a 100% free and open source blogging platform
- allows users to select which events are public and which are private
- allows users to select which services to aggregate and show activity from
- utilizes open standards to collect and publish data
- and allows users to distribute and do with this data what they please
You can see this plugin in action in a number of different places:
But no matter how "cool" I think this is, the single most important thing to me is that Action Streams has helped majordojo return to its original purpose: to act as a central aggregation for all of my activity online, and to do so in a way that just works that doesn't require me to do any extra work. Just use the tools I like to use, and let it do the rest.
Never, never put cool in quotes, man!
So, a neat plugin. Yes, people would like to coalesce their myriad streams into something, but I don't think directing that into a old-fashioned blog -- into a publishing metaphor -- is really what people are dreaming of. Yes, I would like to have an archive to search against, although a tree of published pages is not really the best for that: that's what databases are for.
The real issue is that real control will have to be incredibly fine-grained, and the blog publishing approach has been too coarsely-grained in general for that purpose. Blogging is grounded in the 'everything is public' and 'everything is a page' model, and the technologies all reflect that to a great extent.
So, it's not blogging evolution that we need, but a new fusion of the concepts of social media reflected in real social context and the nature of the current web. Like many others, I believe we have to draw on what we know about social networks -- not just their current implementation on the web in Facebook or socially networked services like Flickr or Dopplr -- but real-world social networks: the ways that people share and don't share things with each other.
We are moving to a fragmented world of cascading streams: del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates, blog posts, Google reader recommendations, Basecamp milestone updates. Just like the old days of American wireless telephony, the various services don't interoperate well, and a variety of gasketry is emerging to bridge the various services in what turn out to be frustrating and partial solutions.
I get an RSS stream from Dopplr, for example, and plug it into my blog as a widget. However, the blog technology knows nothing about it, and the various trips that Dopplr is streaming don't flow into my blog's RSS feed. And should they? After all, Dopplr has a well-defined sharing model within the application, which allows me to share trip information in a controlled fashion. Exporting it outside of the context of Dopplr means that those controls are lost. I have opted to allow that info to be public, but others wouldn't.
In a sense, I am moving from a higher level of control to a lower one. Like many lowest common denominator approaches, this leads to something getting lost.
If we are going to bring down all these socially rich opportunities for sharing down to the level of open publishing we are going to lose a lot. We will bleed out all the social subtleties. We need to devise tools and technologies -- and the social expectations -- that will allow us to bring much more socially rich interaction into the context of social media.
One of the things I am focused on these days is a startup where my partners and I are are actively exploring these topics. Without revealing too much of our plans, I can characterize the world we see changing and that we hope to midwife. As we move from the 'web of pages' metaphor -- based on hypertext and publishing metaphors -- and enter a 'web of flow' -- based on information streaming through interpersonal relationships -- we will have some major disruptions.
The proliferation of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of highly specific social applications that will produce streams derived from people's activities, writings, and media is leading to a fragmentation of web identity and social connection.
There is no hope of 'one ring to bind them' at least in the near term. There is no standard, no app, no movement that is going to head off the next few years of chaos as various contending models are dreamed up and tested in the marketplace of ideas as applications, platforms, or widgety glue.
I am betting on a step-wise process, and the announcement from Six Apart is an example of that. We will see increasingly sophisticated widgetry being created, leading us one step at a time up and away from the page/ publishing model toward a new world of socially constrained streams. It will take years, but new standards will emerge, either de facto or de jure, that will allow us to control access to information flowing through a sprawling web of flow based on social controls. Whatever form this takes will certainly require the controls -- to some extent -- being pushed into the information that is flowing. The updates, photos, notes, recommendations, and videos that we will share through these streams will have to be locked (encrypted) so that only those to whom we have given the keys can open them.
We will need a federated identity system as the core of this, but just as important is the basic notion that a vast conglomeration of interoperating applications would have to share the metaphor of streams as the basis for everything, and move away from pages. We will need to federate the identity of the applications in exactly the same way that we will validate our human identities, so that applications can stream information on our behalf. A project management tool might serve a user the status update from a friend that was created in a Twitter-like app of the not-too distant future, and vice versa, the status update of that first user could travel out to the Twitter-like app, and be propagated to anyone allowed to see it. For this to work, the lock has to be in the stream droplet, and every application will have to allow us to slide in the key to open it.
Ultimately the ability to create a published page at a specific URL on the web will be something like the ability to dump the bits stored at a specific location on my hard drive: occasionally useful, but not the way that we generally interact with the information there.
I believe this is as profound a change as the movement from text to windows-based UI, or the movement from disconnected computing to the Web.
The final completion of the social revolution will be, not surprisingly, wiring the sociality that connects us together into the architecture of the platform we will be standing on.
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