The Social

The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open-standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.

Recordon, who formally announced the job change on his LiveJournal, will take on the title of senior open programs manager. "This past year as I've worked closer with teams at Facebook, I've been impressed by their products, smart people, and innovation," he wrote in the post.

It wasn't so long ago that Facebook was seen as the ultimate in closed-off technology, with profiles hidden behind a log-in wall and features built with in-house technologies rather than open standards. At that time, a hire like Recordon would've seemed to many a ludicrous match. But Facebook's changing: it joined the OpenID Foundation earlier this year, made a big chunk of its developer platform open-source, and its Facebook Connect universal-log-in product has earned both developer and mass-market approval.

Recordon told me he doesn't want to say too much until after he's actually started at Facebook, which will be on Monday. But I spoke to a few of his soon-to-be Facebook colleagues, and they sound excited: the 5-year-old company has never had an already-prominent open-source advocate on staff, .

Facebook, which plans to raise its employee head count by 50 percent this year, made several very prominent hires earlier this month when it acquired start-up FriendFeed in a deal that seems to have been aimed largely at getting its ex-Googler founders on board at Facebook.

Correction 2:25 p.m. PDT: This story initially misstated David Recordon's new title at Facebook. It is senior open programs manager.

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees--20 out of 28--had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was "about a dozen" cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

Yahoo veteran Matthew Berardo, who was hired as general manager of the service less than a year ago, was affected by the layoff.

LiveJournal was founded nearly a decade ago by OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who sold the company to blog software firm Six Apart. But that led to widespread reports of management difficulties, and late in 2007, Six Apart resold LiveJournal, phenomenally popular in Russia, to the Moscow-based software company SUP.

Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.

It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.

"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15," Culver wrote. "Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function...(you can) import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."

Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzzworthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share.

Additionally, we heard that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. This is, after all, not a great time to be raising money.

Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox. "We hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future," Six Apart's Chris Alden wrote on the company blog.

Pownce's two other co-founders, Rose and Daniel Burka, will become Six Apart "advisers."

Google announced on Friday the release of a number of updates to its Blogger publishing platform--well, sort of. The updates have gone into Blogger in Draft, the service's beta platform, with the expectation that they'll eventually become full features.

The updates will seem a bit humdrum for people who don't use Blogger, but for those who do, it's a set of important baby steps toward shaping the service to fit customer feedback. That's especially important for Google, as this is one niche of the Web where Mountain View doesn't have a huge lead: there is tough competition in the blog-publishing market, especially from the likes of WordPress and Six Apart.

Blogger users who want to be on the cutting edge will now be able to set their default "dashboard" to Blogger in Draft, and have the Blogger in Draft blog bookmarked as an easy reference. There's tighter integration of Google Gadgets, as well as a number of minor fixes to a recently redesigned dashboard.

But the "by popular demand" features are likely to gather more interest: five-star rating options on posts, much like those of Pownce; a revised post editor interface; support for Google Account logins and OpenID in comments; and perhaps most importantly, the ability to back up blog posts on a computer or export them to another blog.

LiveJournal, the blogging platform that was a few years ahead of its time, announced Thursday that it has appointed Matthew Berardo, most recently the senior director of international business and product management at Yahoo, as its vice president and general manager.

Berardo had been at Yahoo for years, seven of which were spent in its London office at Yahoo Europe. A new senior management team has been brought on board along with him, which includes former employees of Expedia, virtual worlds developer Millions Of Us, and telephony start-up Jangl. Berardo will report directly to SUP CEO Andrew Paulson.

Founded in 1999 by OpenID creator and current Googler Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal was acquired in December by the Russian media company SUP after a stint as a property of Bay Area software company Six Apart. The nearly three years of Six Apart ownership didn't go too well, insiders explained, and a new buyer was sought out. Considering nearly 6 million of LiveJournal's 20 million users are in Russia, SUP made sense; LiveJournal remains headquartered in San Francisco.

So many big names, so little excitement.

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

SAN FRANCISCO--Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith had quite an opportunity on his hands. He was moderating a panel called "Comparing Social Platforms," featuring five representatives of some of the biggest players on the social Web: Dave Morin of Facebook, Allen Hurff of MySpace, Jessica Alter of Bebo, Patrick Chanezon of Google, and David Recordon of Six Apart. Smith had the chance to be a digital devil's advocate and get a lively debate going.

Why won't Facebook sign on to the OpenSocial standard that Google kick-started? Why hasn't MySpace's developer platform caught on as fast as execs had hoped? And how's it going with Bebo's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy of accepting both OpenSocial- and Facebook- compatible developer applications? On that note, how has Bebo's acquisition by AOL changed things? There were so many questions that could've been explored.

Unfortunately, the panel was sort of a yawn. Maybe that's because it was 8:30 a.m., and a number of the panelists had likely been out till the break of dawn at the wild party Digg threw the previous night. (A Web 2.0 maxim: When all else fails, blame fratty Digg founder Kevin Rose.) And the overall gist of the panel--"developer platforms are so new, so who knows where they'll go?"--didn't exactly provide a whole lot of answers to the curious audience.

"The social graph hasn't even been tapped yet," Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, said. "We're literally, like, right in the beginning." That was pretty much the gist of the whole panel. Smith, too, brought up the novelty of it all: "A year ago, none of the platforms or products that we're talking about were even publicly available."

Chanezon, an OpenSocial API evangelist at Google, didn't exactly toss any punches at Facebook's Morin for not jumping on the OpenSocial bandwagon. In fact, he gave the social network a bit of praise for pioneering the idea of a developer platform. Once Facebook opened its doors to outside developers, everyone else wanted a piece of the action. "Social apps didn't exist before you guys. You just created the space."

A few interesting points were brought up. Alter talked about Bebo's current challenge of providing accurate metrics as to exactly which applications are drawing the most activity. Morin teased Facebook's upcoming payment system as a way to help developers make a buck or two. "Social commerce is likely the future of how e-commerce is done on the Web," he said, "so we're working on a commerce engine and enabling people to take payments on Facebook."

Smith briefly addressed MySpace's developer platform, asking Hurff, the News Corp.-owned site's director of engineering, why things had been "taking a bit slower" than expected. "We are taking it slow," Hurff answered as though it were a deliberate choice on MySpace's part. "I expect that to pick up...we haven't had anything bad happen."

Things briefly got exciting when Morin started mentioning Facebook's commitments to data portability--the ability to translate your identity from one social network to the next--and Six Apart's Recordon seemed to take issue. "Our intent is to enable the user to take their data with them anywhere they want to go...it's certainly our intent to enable a user to have access to whatever data they need," Morin explained. It seemed a little bit counterintuitive, considering Facebook's closed-off reputation. "Over the next year we're thinking a lot about how to do that both on Facebook and off of Facebook."

Recordon interjected,"You can't just go out and say we need data portability." Later in the panel, after I suggested via Twitter that he was implying that Facebook's commitment to data portability was all talk, he elaborated. "All of data portability is talk. People need to focus on doing something useful with open standards, and portability will come naturally."

Beyond that, the panel was mostly predictable. The panelists seemed to agree that the art of the developer platform is evolving, and will continue to evolve. Great. We knew that already. One prediction, however, struck a chord: "One of the things that I can see happening in the next year," Chanezon predicted, "(is that) application developers are going to start to open up their own APIs for other application developers to reuse." In other words, a platform on a platform.

That's trippy.

Blogging software company Six Apart has announced a new "social media services" strategy that involves a new satellite office in New York, the acquisition of social-media consulting and development firm Apperceptive, and a new initiative to "provide new advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies of all sizes."

In other words, the company is moving beyond simply providing software, entering the lucrative business of bringing clients into gear with that whole "Web 2.0" thing that all the cool kids are talking about.

Six Apart, which operates blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, has been working with Apperceptive on development and design projects for the past two years. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

TechCrunch reported on Saturday that Six Apart had made a "significant" acquisition but couldn't name the company getting bought. Well, it's not quite that exciting, but Commenter #156 did answer correctly when TechCrunch's Michael Arrington offered a free iPod Shuffle to the first person who correctly guessed the company.

With the acquisition, Six Apart will develop social media applications (e.g. a presence on the Facebook platform) for clients. In addition, the company has started offering premium advertising services to high-traffic bloggers and community sites, "blog optimization" consulting, design and development services, and a VIP support program for "influential bloggers."

The company's new office in New York, the hub of the advertising industry, is in the new-media-heavy SoHo neighborhood.

A look at Six Apart's Blog It, a tool that lets you manage both blogging accounts and messaging services from a single page.

(Credit: Six Apart)

The Web might have just gotten one step closer to a universal "social dashboard" capable of managing an array of blogging, messaging, networking, and media applications. It's a small step, but still a move in the right direction.

Six Apart, the software company behind blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, has launched a new Facebook application called "Blog It." Facebook members who install the application can post to multiple blogging services at one time, update their Facebook status in sync with micro-blogging services like Twitter, and have updates from the app appear in their Facebook Mini-Feeds.

David Recordon, who holds the title of open-platforms lead tech at Six Apart, told me the thinking behind Blog It was "how we can start to bridge some of that gap between blogging and social networking." In its launch form, Blog It is a little bit limited, but seems to be on the right track; within its Facebook application, you can simultaneously update any Six Apart blogs as well as Google's Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal (formerly owned by Six Apart), and a number of others.

Once you've typed the world's next great blog post, you can opt to have a notification sent to your Facebook activity feed as well as accounts on the Twitter or Pownce micro-blogging platforms. Beyond that, you can also send a single "status" message to Twitter and Pownce as well as the Facebook Status feature.

The application is powered by Six Apart's TypePad technology, and currently accepts HTML code but is otherwise rather feature-light. Recordon said it will see updates and improvements as time goes on.

Right now, Blog It is limited to Facebook's platform. Recordon said he'd consider the possibility of a light, downloadable desktop application in the manner of Twhirl, a Twitter client that simultaneously updates Jaiku and Pownce. He also said that because Six Apart was one of the inaugural partners in the OpenSocial developer standard, OpenSocial versions of Blog It are likely on the way. "We could probably see this running inside Plaxo," Recordon hinted.

Plaxo, which recently made the jump from contact management to social networking, has been one of the chief evangelists behind account portability and feed aggregation--occasionally bumping elbows with more conservative sites like Facebook in the process.

With the phrase "social network fatigue" becoming commonplace, there are now a handful of different standards opting to consolidate user and developer data, not to mention a number of new start-ups that aggregate feeds from social sites across the Web so that (ideally) you can see exactly what your friends are doing, all in one place. Blog It, however limited, nevertheless goes a step further by letting you update multiple blogging platforms, broadcast those updates to multiple social-messaging sites as well as share them on Facebook, and create a universal "status."

And with the way things have been going, one of these days we'll see an application that can manage multiple accounts as well as let us keep tabs on our friends.

Facebook, meanwhile, announced Tuesday that it would be gradually allowing members to incorporate activity feeds from external social-media sites like Flickr and Yelp into their profiles.