BrightKite, FireEagle, and Airports

I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading.
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TripIt Traveler Profiles, Action Stream

(Via the TripIt blog)

TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:

The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.

It’s got a nice, RESTful public url - mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin - the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.

You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone - but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link - just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).

New Action Stream: TripIt Activity

As regular readers of Open Parenthesis know, I’ve been using Movable Type Open Source (and particularly the Action Streams plugin) on JohnEckman.com to create a life stream of activity.

It’s basically a roll-your-own lifestream, though for now at least it isn’t integrated to anyone else’s streams, as in Friendfeed or Socialthing.

This morning I posted a new plugin which picks up TripIt Activity Streams.

TripIt’s activity stream is a private Atom feed which posts an item whenever you begin a trip, complete a trip, or start planning a trip. For example, here’s a recent entry from my feed:

You can download the plugin from the MTAS page.

MT Activity Streams

I’m experimenting a bit with Movable Type 4.1 and the Action Streams plugin.

Check out the work in progress at johneckman.com. Read on if you’re interested in creating your own action streams.

Although it has been a while since I’ve worked in Movable Type, it was a relatively painless install (assuming you’ve got the basic LAMP stuff in place).
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Activity Streams, Prologue

Lots of activity in the last week on the distributed social networking front.

Matt and co. at Automattic released Prologue, a WordPress theme (GPLv2) which creates a twitter-like experience based on posts to a WordPress blog. (It’s already been updated once).

Check out the Prologue Demo Blog for a sense of how the theme works. This could easily be used to create a kind of workgroup twitter, and given the number of different plugins / mechanisms for creating a blog post it could be extended to mobile, IM, and other integration points. The important difference, of course, is that you’d be hosting your own experience, not relying on Twitter - though that also means you’d need to build your own audience.

The folks at SixApart released the Activity Streams plugin for Movable Type which

lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.

You can see a great example of this on David Recordon’s site (he’s the Open Platform Lead for SixApart) and in a group context on the Movable Type Activity Stream page.

Both of these represent significant advances toward an open source, open standards, portable data approach to social networking and lifestreaming.

Since the implementations are open source, expect similar functionality to be ported across platforms.