Thank you very much.
Arthur

I'd highlight a few points that might clarify some of the points you've raised. First, We totally agree that there are legitimate worries about social networking fatigue, or an unwillingness to create new profiles, at least amongst those of us who are tech geeks and tend to sign up for lots of sites. So, our model in Movable Type is to let all of those services federate together. Action Streams, which you mention above, are a key part of this, but there are lots more examples to have we've invested more than anyone in the idea of open, interoperable social networking.

* Movable Type was the only blogging platform onstage at the Facebook Connect launch, where we demonstrated working code that will be shipping as a plugin shortly.
* OpenID was invented at Six Apart, and is supported by Movable Type right out of the box. In less than three years, half a billion OpenIDs have been created, and new services like MySpace are coming online all the time.
* Our community's created two-way synchronization with services like FriendFeed, so you don't have to worry about losing comments that happen on other sites.
* Connecting your services together requires powerful APIs and good developer adoption of them, and we co-created OAuth at Six Apart and have shipped features like commenting API support in MT 4.2 to make it even easier to plug these pieces together. (That OAuth support is why, for instance, MT was the first platform to support Yahoo's Fire Eagle.)
* Most importantly, Action Streams can work with services like Blog It, which can live in Facebook or on your iPhone, and let you form two-way connections with the other services and devices that you use.

I know I've rambled on a good bit here, but the short version is: These new communities that are forming are not going to be islands. We don't have a vision of thousands of disconnected communities, but rather that all of us as individuals will be able to seamlessly bring our identities to any communities that we choose.

And finally, all of the pieces I've talked about here are real, and exist, and are shipping today. I know there's always this desire to see these technology platforms as being in some kind of horse race, but frankly it's ridiculous to present a collection of unreleased plugins as equivalent to Movable Type's community features, which are shipping today, power huge sites like BoingBoing and the Washington Post, and have been tested and proven to be reliable and secure.

Honestly, I hope that every platform starts to evolve and adopt open standards like OpenID and OAuth and Action Streams and the other technologies that will make open social networking possible, but for right now, the only platform that makes these things possible is the one made by the folks who invented them: Movable Type.

j

Personally, after having played with Del.icio.us, Diigo, Facebook and whatnot, I recently came to the conclusion that sharing with no return/feedback from anybody has little meaning so when comments are better valued than 'clicks', 'diggs', 'votes', 'shares' whatever digg-like website can think of it will really mean the beginning of the construction of a social network. Until now I haven't seen much taking that direction.
Make people talk with each others instead of at each others.

@Alex - nice job!

Elgg has a new demo site, but it's too slow for my taste. I have a social network running socialengine.net.

I disagree. This statement implies that social networking can only be done in a hierarchical fashion- that each site will have its own sub-network and ne'er the twain shall meet. In this model, yes- the only way to merge segmented social networks is for one contender to rise above the others and through their magnanimity publish APIs to allow the small-timers to access their network info, sort of like Facebook Connect.

On the contrary, I think these standalone solutions from WP and MT will indirectly promote a more heterogeneous architecture that is more in keeping with the structure of the internet itself. What we we need are open standards (ad hoc or otherwise) for sites to share networks, so that for instance, I can have a profile hosted on my own WP site that includes Facebook, Myspace, Wordpress, Moveable Type, etc. profiles directly in my network- and vice versa. If enough standalone sites go the independent route for their social networking rather than hook directly into the big social networking sites, such an open model will become the only way to defragment the social networking scene; and it will be in Facebook et al's interest to take part in it.

Long term, this will mean the social networking sites will have to compete with more than just scale (that is, getting people to join just so they can interact with their friends who are already on the site). I think this will have benefits all around.

You have also jQuery in the core, jQuery UI through a module (for a good web 2.0 UI), tons of multmedia modules, voting system, digg like module and so on.

They got the 2007 CMS Award from Packt Publishing.

The issue here is that we are seeing just more stovepipes in the SocNet space - I think you are right, that blogs *could* be the "personal webpage" of an Open SocNet, but I think its a few steps down the line. Not sure I'd trust Wordpress though, it's security is dodgy (cf its hacking by black hat SEOs that is meme's ing around Twitter right now)

@29 - We wrote our website in Drupal, but it is so powerful (ie complex) that it is overkill for simple apps like most blogs - we set up our blog (Broadstuff) in Serendipity, which is a halfway house between Drupal and Wordpress in capability.

Why stop with just your "ID" being "Open" after all?

Just a precision : the complexity not belongs to Drupal but to the scope of goals sometimes we have to achieve in social web developpment. Drupal is a very good balance between power and ease of use and you can go to industrial scale.

If you have for exemple to develop links between your platform and says, an in-house external database, even if you have a very friendly publishing platform, the developpment will be complex.

What we can really call complex web publishing platform are Typo3 and EZ Publish.

It's as if you think you people are the only ones having this discussion.

DataPortability, OpenID, OpenAuth, the Diso project (on google groups), and most recently the Open Web Foundation are all about the issues you are promoting.

Do you really think OpenID is just about ID? First things first pal, and they haven't even got that correct yet.

Please get over yourself(ves).

http://www.vBulletin.com/forum/ and their announcement forum has all the details.

I'm sure that Internet Brands INC will do very well in this market. Spamming comment sections of blogs is exactly how the media likes to interact, I've read it in the many missives of late regarding PR on the web today.

Are you really santa claus?

And just as a opinion. Would does have enough social networks and related tools. Those trying to catch up should focus on something that is significantly better. :)

Ashish
http://www.hmreviews.com

I'd certainly say goodbye social web and hello blogging over and over again...