Six Apart Wants To Help Manage Your Social Networks
Six Apart, makers of Typepad, Movable Type and other blogging tools, have posted an interesting look at “network portability” for social networking sites. The post is authored by David Recordon, who also collaborated on the much discussed social graph article on Brad Fitzpatrick’s site.
Six Apart isn’t announcing anything new exactly, rather they’re demonstrating how sites, and you, can combine tools like OpenID, FOAF, and the microformats XFN and xCard. Essentially the plan is to display this data much the way you would create a blogroll — but in this case the outbound links point to your own profiles — and then let other services scrape it to identify and connect the dots.
The next step beyond that is to mine the XFN and FOAF data on those sites to pull in your friends so you can see how you’re connected on each network and in turn discover the same people on other networks that you don’t realize you share.
Six Apart says that it’s currently building a Movable Type plug-in designed to “help you create and manage your own elsewhere list.” It also says that this feature will be coming to Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad as well.
Beyond this tidbit, Six Apart hasn’t made any specific statements regarding how it will implement these new ideas or what exact form they will take. Judging by today’s post it seems that progress on the idea may well follow a trajectory similar to OpenID, where other sites slowly adopt the technique and Six Apart does its own specific implementations within its ecosystem of apps.
To see what Six Apart is talking about, have a look at the demo video they’ve posted.
For those that don’t want go to the trouble of writing their own XFN code, Six Apart’s tool looks to be an easy way to identify your accounts and your friends — though you’ll notice some gaps in the screenshot above, for instance, Facebook isn’t represented.
The system has promise, though it’s heavy on the identify and light on the manage — in other words Six Apart has presented a way to expose/gather your social data, but there aren’t many tools for managing it.
But Six Apart isn’t trying to present a panacea, rather they’re looking for input from users. “If you use social sites, we encourage you to think about what tools would be most beneficial to your online experience and to blog your thoughts with the tag or category ‘socialgraph’”.
I’ve gone ahead and tagged this post accordingly, so let them know what you want….
