Action Flows from Six Apart

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

Although Action Streams has a lot in common with FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse , Six 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 a flexible framework, everyone who knows at least a little bit in programming can make the necessary changes there that are convenient for him,” wrote in his address, Open Platforms Technical Director, Six Apart David Recordon (David Recordon).

Expanding standards, Six Apart uses Atom and Microformat hAtom formats in the plugin, which, according to the company, will help users to control the “workflows” and use them at their discretion.
')
To some extent, this offer from Six Apart seems to be what makes their main Automattic competitor with Wordpress: microblogging. A couple of days ago, Automattic introduced a new Wordpress theme called Prologue, which gives Wordpress features similar to Twitter. The Six Apart plugin allows users to create a tumblelog where all information posted by the user on the web (tweets, photos on Flickr, etc.) will be collected. Action Flows and Tumblr aren’t the same as Prologue and Twitter aren’t, but they work the same way.

In this regard, there may be two trends:

1. The microblogging trend — regular updates are becoming a visible and integral part of blogging.

2. The tendency to open formats and portability of information - you can carry all the information with you and place it where and how you want.

How long will it take for Wordpress to respond to the “Flows of Action” from Six Apart? It seems to me that developers in Wordpress will not be long in coming. A few months ago, my friend Dan Grossman (Dan Grossman) used the plugin he designed for his Wordpress blog, which did, in fact, all the same. He did not release it because the plugin did not interest anyone. Perhaps this will change soon.

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