The Real McCrea

Caption: David Recordon (left) and Joseph Smarr (right) at the Social Graph Foo Camp

Recently, Joseph Smarr and I were invited by David Recordon of SixApart to take a look at something they were about to launch, called BlogIt. We got very excited and had lots of ideas about where they and we (Plaxo) could go together with this. It just launched, so I can now talk openly about it.

BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is right, I think, to say that BlogIt “could be the start of something big.” At the core, BlogIt makes it easy to quickly create and publish a blogpost from within a social network or application, and have the post go to multiple destinations and get promoted from multiple sources (for example, Twitter). The first implemenation targets the Facebook platform, but obviously this can go to other networks, such as MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo Pulse, etc. via the Google-led OpenSocial platform.

What I like about it, is that we are still in the early phases of social media, social networking, and the opening up of the social web. Social networks and content aggregators can be a great way to mainstream the social media experience, and help millions of voices that are not currently heard jump into the world of blogging. How? By making it really easy to post — and to have a pre-existing audience — in the form of the local social graph(s) of the user.

David’s done a nice post, helping explain where this all fits in and where SixApart might go with this. Brad King, of TechWorldNews, also has a nice piece that puts this into a broader perspective. (I enjoyed my interview with him earlier today greatly!)