Comments for Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams

Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams

2008-01-30T16:56:45Z

Six Apart this morning launched a plugin for their MovableType blogging platform that aggregates and displays a user's activity from social web sites. Similar to FriendFeed, the Action Streams plugin displays things like, your latest posts to Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, or events from Upcoming. The plugin is available this morning as a free download for MovableType 4.1 and currently supports 75 difference services.

]]> Though Action Streams is very similar to FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse, Six Apart is quick to point out that a key difference exists: you're the one hosting and controlling your activity stream. "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," wrote David Recordon, the Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart, in a blog post.

Further embracing open standards, actions are published via the plugin using the Atom format and the Microformat hAtom, which Six Apart hopes will make it easier for people to move their activity streams around and use them however they like.

On some level, this development at Six Apart somewhat mirrors the direction that chief rival Automattic is taking with Wordpress: microblogging. A couple of days ago, Automattic introduced a new theme for Wordpress.com called Prologue, which adds Twitter-like functionality to Wordpress. Six Apart's plugin, meanwhile, basically allows users to create a tumblelog of content aggregated from the places they already post it (thoughts from Twitter, images from Flickr, etc.). Activity Streams and Tumblr are not perfectly analogous, the same way Prologue and Twitter are not, but they do all fit in the same category of tools.

To me these announcements points to a couple of key trends:

A trend toward microblogging -- always on updates distilled to their most base form are becoming a more visible and important part of blogging.
A trend toward open formats and data portability -- take your data with you and display it however and wherever you want.

So how long until Wordpress follows Six Apart's lead with Activity Streams? My guess is that the always strong Wordpress developer community won't take very long at all to kick something unofficial out. In fact, my friend Dan Grossman has been using a plugin he developed for his own Wordpress-powered blog to do more or less the same thing for months now (see it in action here). He hasn't released the source yet because others haven't expressed much interest to him. Perhaps that's about to change.

As more sites join DataPortability.org and we begin to hopefully see the fruits of their labor, things like distributed activity streams should become easier and more common.

Comment from Louis Gray on 2008-01-30

2008-01-30T19:48:39Z

This is a good add for Six Apart. FriendFeed is a great tool I'm using every day. But their uniqueness is also in selecting friends and seeing their streams in one place, with collaboration and comments, while this appears to be individual-based and siloed.

Comment from Neil on 2008-01-30

2008-01-30T21:19:03Z

Quite a few people have been doing this under the guise of 'Lifestream', and you can get a few plugins that'll do the trick quite nicely. You have to know a little about the innards of WordPress themes, though.

I put a CSS styled Tumblr Newsfeed on my blog a week or so ago. The Tumblr 'Share' Firefox addon has made it a great addition.

Looking forward to playing round with Prologue tonight....

Comment from Anil on 2008-01-30

2008-01-30T21:48:42Z

Thanks for the writeup, Josh. I'd make a clarification about some of the comparisions you've listed here, though -- this isn't just a template or theme for your blog that lets you write shorter posts. This is an entire framework of connecting to dozens of services around the web.

There's also an important distinction that this is a key part of our platform, developed by the core MT team itself. That means that it's not a PHP script somebody cobbled together on their own to try to make a lifestream, it's a framework to actually help open up *all* of these services. And again, that's distinct from the other efforts you mention because we don't just talk about opening up the web at Six Apart, we actually create standards like OpenID, which has enabled hundreds of millions of identities online, and we lead in efforts like OAuth and OpenSocial, though of course it is great to see other platforms, as you said, following our lead.

The overall trends you've mentioned are undoubtedly powerful -- it's exciting to see MT users be the first to really be able to take advantage of them. And Louis, this can absolutely be used to aggregate activity from groups of people: Take a look at this group action stream for the Movable Type team, and then imagine that in the context of Vox's powerful privacy features, if your'e familiar with the aggregation tools we've created there.