Social Networking Via WordPress, Moveable Type and (gasp) in Person!
Gigaom has a good introduction to a proposal from Chris Messina to turn WordPress into an open social network he calls DiSo. He calls the project that he is working on with Steve Ivy and Will Norris a network built “inside-out.”
“For starters, “citizen centric web services” will arguably be better
for people over the long term. We’re in the toddler days of that
situation now, but think about passports and credit cards:
- your passport provides proof of provenance and allows you
to leave home without permanently give up your port of origin
(equivalent: logging in to Facebook with your MySpace account to “poke”
a friend — why do you need a full Facebook account for that if you’re
only “visiting”?);
Not a bad analogy to living on the Web. This comes at the same time that Moveable Type (used by some of our Beat Bloggers) makes an announcement to go open source. This means more functionality and tools, but it also means the road is wide open about how Moveable Type and WordPress can develop.
It’s all a bit tech-oriented right now. Just like Google’s Open-Social, if you aren’t a programmer then this won’t effect you for about a year. But it’s another mark on the wall of turning the infrastructure of the web into a social network itself. Which means learning the tricks of the trade now, while third-party sites like Facebook and MySpace or Multiply (Read/Write Web’s review of Multiply) run the show, will be a boon to journalists who are on their own in the future.
