Business Blogging

You might know Six Apart as the company behind various blogging tools and platforms such as Movable Type and LiveJournal. This week the company boldly announced that it was “Opening the Social Graph” which all sounds very impressive and Web 2.0-ish, but probably means absolutely nothing to average Joe Webuser. I’ll try to decipher the announcement as best I can, but please feel free to correct me if you think I’ve misinterpreted.

Let’s start with ‘social graph’ – your social graph describes the complex array of relationships you have with other users of the various social media platforms you use. That includes all your Facebook friends, the people who comment on your blog, the bloggers who you leave comments for, Digg users you chat with and so on. At present, the social graph is more of a concept than a tangible thing – it only really exists in the form of a bunch of different website accounts, but it’s mostly managed in your head rather than by any one service or technology.

What Six Apart is announcing is a set of open source technologies which will make your social graph easier to manage. Imagine if you didn’t have to set up a new account every time you wanted to comment on a blog or join a new site like Flickr or YouTube. Instead, imagine that you have a simple tool that you can use for managing your online identity and the online relationships you have with different websites and other people.

OpenID is the technology which will make this happen – the project originally started life at LiveJournal, and has now taken on a life of its own as an open source platform, but Six Apart is still very much involved in its development, and pushing more people to adopt it as a standard for online identity management.

The meat of what Six Apart is announcing here is a kind of proof of concept demo based around OpenID and various other technologies (which I won’t go into, because it would take up too much space, and I can’t be bothered to do the research) which allows you to manage all of your social networks from one place. Think about that for a second –you’ve got accounts on Digg, Facebook, YouTube and who knows what else, not to mention a dozen or so blogs scattered across various platforms, all requiring separate logins and individual management of your relationships within those online locations. What Six Apart wants to do is allow you to do all of that stuff in one place.

Furthermore, you might want to manage multiple identities for different parts of your online life – keeping your professional and personal identities separate is an increasing concern for a lot of people. Again, Six Apart is talking about providing the tools which make it easy to do that from a single locations and this leads onto giving users greater control over their privacy.

This can all be quite complicated stuff when you get right down to the technical nuts and bolts – most people aren’t going to be interested in all this low level detail. Nevertheless, it’s got the potential to lead us in some very interesting directions and significantly change the way we all use the web, so it’s worth paying attention. If nothing else, I recommend you run through the example videos on Six Apart’s site, since they provide an easy to digest demonstration of how this kind of stuff might work for end users in the real world.