Six Apart, the company behind the Movable Type blogging platform, has announced a new Movable Type plugin that will pull in all your social web activities and display them on your blog. The new Action Streams plugin collects things like your Twitter messages, events from Upcoming, links posted to ma.gnolia, videos uploaded to YouTube and more, and displays them all in one spot -- your Movable Type blog.
With services like Twitter, Pownce, Digg and others popularizing the idea of short, digestible, single-thought posts, collecting and following what your friends are up to often requires you to join and follow them on dozens of different sites. The same headache exists for those wanting to keep track of you. Frankly, it's a mess.
Action streams, microblogging, lifestreaming or whatever you want to call them, are the Lunchables of today's snack-size web culture — packaging up your web existence in a neat, organized container.
Tools like the new Movable Type Action Stream plugin give you a way to keep everyone up-to-date with all your web activities regardless of whether or not your friends are members of all the different sites you use.
MT Action Streams are a bit like FriendFeed, Plaxo's Pulse or even Facebook's mini-feeds, but with one key difference — you host, and therefore control, the data being collected. Although it's still a fledging project, perhaps the closest parallel to MT Action Streams is the DiSo project, which is hoping to the do the same (and more) for WordPress users.
The data spit out by Action Streams takes advantage of open tools like microformats to display your data and offers an Atom feed for sharing your microblogging joys with friends.
Setting up Action Streams isn't difficult, just download and install the plugin and then feed it some URLs for the services you use. The plugin ships with a Template Set (a new feature in MT 4.1) which allows you to create an action stream in just a few clicks.
To see the new plugin in action, have a look at Six Apart's Open Platforms Tech Lead David Recordon's personal site (pictured above). There's also an option to aggregate multiple author's action streams and display them all in one place, should you happen to run an MT-powered community site. For instance, have a look at the action stream for Six Apart employees.
As someone who ditched Movable Type two years ago precisely because it didn't have exactly this functionality, I think the new Action Streams plugin will be a hit with MT users. It provides all the functionality of a Facebook mini-feed, but without the need to limit your audience to Facebook (or any other hosted service).
The plugin is available now as a free download for MovableType 4.1 and currently supports some 75 difference sites.
See Also:
