One of the fun projects I've been involved in at work the past few months has been Motion which we're describing as "a new free beta social application for Movable Type." As Anil wrote today in the blog post announcing the public beta:

But the vision of Motion is something we've been working on for a long time, well before we acquired Pownce or before the tech blogosphere started talking about Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect. So, we'd like to outline some of the guiding principles that informed our creation of Motion, as a starting point to the conversation about where social applications in general are headed.

• The biggest social network is the Internet itself.
• Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.
• Reveal the community you already have.
• Your social network belongs under your control.
• Your community should start with half a billion members.
• The web is in Motion.

Basically, Motion brings even more social feature to Movable Type focused on being able to run an interactive community, a social network, that is connected with the rest of the web. This means that the main page of your site is an aggregation of what your members are posting locally (photos, videos, text, links, etc) as well as the actions they're taking around the web (such as their Twitter updates). Profiles then show what a person has been doing and who they're following. Really just all sorts of interesting stuff that's explained even better on the Movable Type Motion beta page.

It's been a fun project since the team hasn't been thinking about how to cram every latest feature from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr or FriendFeed into Motion, but rather around what real community maintainers are wanting to be able to do with this sort of tool. It also follows through on our announcement at Facebook f8 earlier this year where we said that we would ship support for Facebook Connect, but of course we did it Six Apart style and included support for Google's OpenID Provider as well!

Go open web, go!

Down in San Diego for a few days for VeriSign's Technical Symposium. Seems United figured out someway to lose my bag between SFO and SAN. Guess out of the ~190,000 miles I've flown with them the past 14 months that this isn't a bad time for them to lose it (first time from all of my trips). Back up in San Francisco Wednesday night and then hoping for some diving this weekend!

I'll be in Tokyo the 13th (well really the afternoon of the 12th) through the 20th of this month to talk to a whole variety of people about OpenID. VeriSign's Japanese office, along with Six Apart's, have been great in helping me setup meetings which I really appreciate! If you're in Tokyo and would like to chat, feel free to drop me an email.

In other travel news, after Tokyo I'm headed straight to Portland for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. I'm speaking along with Simon Willison as part of the Radar Executive Briefing as well as we're giving a 3-hour OpenID Bootcamp tutorial Tuesday morning.

July:

Been awhile since I've written non-OpenID stuff...

Went hiking this weekend organized by niftybitch along with scsi, brad, erinearl, and others. Was out like 20 minutes past Oakland in the middle of the forest, was pretty much awesome. Was about a 4 mile hike and the weather was great.

Was out in Dulles, VA last week and the whether was crazy. First two days were humid, thunder storming, and hailing. Third day was sprinkling rain like what I'd expect up in Seattle. Got about 45 minutes of sleep on my red-eye flight out Monday night, so Tuesday was largely powered by Red Bull. Conor Cahill barbecued so had dinner at his house along with Paul Madsen, Eve Maler, George Fletcher, and others which was also quite fun.

Been playing Super Paper Mario for the Wii the past week or so. Really liking this game. Is a good balance of traditional Mario with some cool new twists. Good balance of mind puzzles as well in terms of thinking about how to get through a level beyond just the traditional timing jumps.

Headed to FooCamp this weekend, so will be in Sebastapol for the first time. Thought about buying a tent today for camping there, though choices at REI were overwhelming. Thinking I'll do some Amazon.com research tonight and see what I can find.

On our way back in. :)

Offsite on a 41' sail boat on the bay! :)

Yesterday flew from San Francisco to London along with Kaliya Hamlin. We're both over here for an ITU-T Focus Group meeting on Identity Management. About 60+ people here and today various people are presenting on technologies related to identity. Just spoke about OpenID...my slides are up at http://openid.net/pres/2007_ITU-T_IdM_FG.pdf. Here through the end of the week...lots of cool stuff I hadn't heard about before.

Saturday we then fly to London and are staying with the gracious Ben Laurie. Hoping to head out to a pub with mart as well that night.

Sunday I'm headed to BarCamp2 along with Chris Messina and his wife Tara Hunt..

Monday is an identity workshop put together by the Identity Society which Kaliya is facilitating. If you're in London and free that day you should come!

Then looks like I'll be attending The Future of Web Apps the following Tuesday and Wednesday where Simon Willison is talking about OpenID!

All in all, a busy two weeks!

oh, also just played with FreeYourID which is awesome since it just works!