With the latest release of Movable Type 4.2, publishers can easily add forums, community blogs, and group blogs to their site. Site members can establish customizable profiles with avatars and can follow their friends. Given the correct permissions, community members can submit content for publishing on the site for the admin to approve. Those submissions will then display next to the comments on the submitter's user profile. Site members can also vote on content they like, too, a feature MT is calling "Digg in a box."

In addition to the changes in MT, Six Apart has also introduced a new plugin called "Action Streams." This plugin is very much inspired by FriendFeed, as it lets you aggregate and share your content from around the social web. In other words, Movable Type has just introduced their own self-hosted lifestream. (We had a feeling this was coming).

An Action Stream

BuddyPress

So where is WordPress's social network? It's still under development. Unlike MT, social networking with not be a feature of WordPress - instead, the WordPress MU core is being used to build out a next-gen publishing platform called BuddyPress . Essentially, BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called "the wire," which sounds a lot like Twitter.

Goodbye Blogging, Hello Social Web?

With both of the big players extending their traditional blogging platforms to offer social networking features, you have to wonder if traditional blogging is on its way out. For many years, web pundits have been saying that social networking would gain in popularity to such an extent that it would become a feature, not a destination in and of itself. These latest designs from MT and WordPress seem to prove that point.

In fact, even on today's blogs, publishers have already been adding social networking features to their sites through the use of blog plugins that offer things like FriendFeed integration, for example. (Case in point: RWW has integrated with FriendFeed). Also, by adding Disqus as a site's blog commenting system, bloggers were including a social network of sorts, as well. Like with MT 4.2, Disqus users can establish profiles, follow users, and track their comments across sites from one page.

More Profiles To Maintain

The only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where's Facebook Friend Connect? Where's Google Friend Connect? Where's your portable social graph in all this?

These new publishing platforms will power the social web of the future, but without tools to make all these disparate social graphs meld together, the people who are actually participating will become even more frustrated than they are today. The need for data portability is even stronger than ever, but we need there to be a clear winner in the game before our lives can improve.

Overall I am still very happy with the design and it achieves the goals that I listed in the announcement post. But as with any Web development project, there is room for more iteration and some tweaking. So I want to assure you that all your feedback will be taken into consideration. Now to the specifics...

Unfortunately we experienced some technical issues with the upgrade, which resulted in comments being either down or dysfunctional at times during the week. Comments are back up now and are working fine, although we are still working on OpenID and Vox integration. We are also looking to improve the speed of comment publishing. My apologies to anyone who left a comment over the past week and experienced difficulties. Normal service has hopefully now resumed.

The Controversial Logo

In regards to the design, our new logo in particular came in for some heavy criticism. I always knew it would get different reactions, but I was surprised and a little shell-shocked at the negative feedback on the logo. I want to reiterate that the boldness and emphasis on 'RWW' are an important part of the re-branding. Also note that ReadWriteWeb is a long name, which is difficult to pronounce and spell. So highlighting the capitals helps people remember it. All those factors need to be considered when you look at this new logo. However, given the feedback, it's apparent that we need to do some tweaking to the logo - so that it both pleases our readers and meets our branding goals. We've already done some subtle tweaking to improve it. And we will continue to iterate on the logo.

Bugs; and Some Advice For Publishers Doing a Re-Design

There are also a few bugs still in the system, which have proven to be particularly thorny. These are a combination of browser issues (IE6 in particular) and Movable Type issues. These bugs have been a source of frustration for us all week. I had thought they'd be cleared up in the first couple of days after launch, but that hasn't turned out to be the case - despite the hard work and long hours put in by our designers.

In hindsight, we probably rushed the new design out too soon - and as publisher I have to take responsibility for that. I was so focused on getting the new design up before xmas. So to all the publishers and designers out there, my advise to you is: don't rush the launch.

Forest for Trees

In summary, despite the criticism and the thorny bugs, I think it's important not to miss the forest for the trees. I thought David's comment on the previous post (#75) summed up nicely what the new design achieves for ReadWriteWeb:

"If you like clean, functional, professional and bold design, you'll love this redesign. It's easy to read and has an openness that the last design didn't have. The red is now isolated to the header and the rest of the page is clean. I like it! Don't let the negatives speak for the majority of people visitng your site."

That is my overall feeling too and if you look at the before and after screenshots below, I hope you'll agree that the new design is much better.

Old RWW design

New RWW design

Summary : Iterate's the Word!

I want to again thank our design team at Ideacodes for delivering a fresh, distinctive and modern design to ReadWriteWeb. It makes our site look more like a professional media publication, which is what it is these days.

But don't worry, we will be taking into account all feedback in our iterations - the criticism as well as the plaudits. We recognize that there are things we can improve and tweak. So keep the feedback coming!

The server upgrade (on Media Temple) and move to Movable Type 4 (Six Apart) are part of a major overhaul to Read/WriteWeb. We also have a re-design in the works.