Action Flows from Six Apart

This morning, Six Apart launched a plug-in for its MovableType blogging platform, which integrates and displays user actions on so-called social sites. Like FriendFeed, the Action Streams plugin displays your latest Twitter posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, or recent Upcoming events. Starting today, a plug-in that supports 75 types of services can be downloaded for free for MovableType 4.1.

Although Action Streams have much in common with FriendFeed and Plaxo PulseSix Apart immediately pointed out one important difference: only you control and manage data about your online activities. “In view of the fact that Activity Streams is absolutely free and has flexible frameworks, anyone who is even a little knowledgeable in programming will be able to make the necessary changes there, convenient for him,” writes David Recordon, Technical Director for Open Platforms at Six Apart. (David Recordon).

Expanding the standards, Six Apart uses the Atom and Microformat hAtom formats in the plugin, which, according to the company, will help users control the "flow of actions" and use them as they wish.

To some extent, this proposal from Six Apart is similar to what their main Automattic competitor with Wordpress does: microblogging. A few days agoAutomattic has unveiled a new theme for Wordpress called Prologue, which gives Wordpress features similar to Twitter. The Six Apart plugin allows users to create a tumblelog where all the information posted by the user on the network (Twitter posts, photos on Flickr, etc.) will be collected. "Flows of Action" and Tumblr are not similar in the same way as Prologue and Twitter are not similar, but they work the same way.

In this regard, two trends may arise:

1. The trend towards microblogging - regular updates become a visible and integral part of blogging.

2. The trend towards open formats and portability of information - you can carry all the information with you and place it wherever and as you like.

How long will it take for Wordpress to respond to Six Apart Flows of Action? It seems to me that the developers in Wordpress will not take long. A few months ago, my friend Dan Grossman used the plugin he developed for his Wordpress blog, which did essentially the same thing. He did not release it because the plugin did not interest anyone. Perhaps this will change soon.

Because more and more sites are joining DataPortability.org, and we see the results of their work, then things like distributed “workflows” will become easier and more accessible.