
Hey hey! Looks like I’m not the only one interested in creating “connected communities” and “streams” of thoughts and interests. Six Apart has just announced Project Comet which looks like an evolution of their blogging software to include community aggregation, multiple content streams, and personalized privacy. This is EXACTLY what I’ve been talking about! Apparently this relates to their latest announcement of TypePad 2.0.
Now the only difference that I see with their approach compared to mine is openness. From what I can tell, I think all members of the aggregated connected communities all need to be using some piece of Six Apart software for it to work. Why? Because it would allow someone to log in only once to the entire system and then be able to view private information on other friends or families sites without having to log in again for each site. That is one of the greatest problems I’m having in an open approach. How do you create levels of privacy to the community (i.e. from totally open to totally secure) when RSS aggregation tools don’t include login features to grab an RSS feed within a secure area of a site.
Oh and course the next step in this evolution would be to get your actual desktop applications to update these different content streams AUTOMATICALLY for you as I mentioned in my post about sharing-enabled software. I mean what if everything you did on your computer had a separate RSS feed for it so that your website could aggregate the content and relay it there for you (i.e. daily links, recent movies watched, latest music listened to, latest games played, etc).