The internet’s all a-tizzy over this new TypeKey hoozitz. While I understand the worries over security and downtimes, there are some areas where centralization can provide useful tools.
TypeKey is Six Apart’s upcoming solution to comment registration and hopeful comment spam panacea:
TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.
The main uproar centers around people not liking the idea of having to trust one central service with their comments. What if someone hacks in and steals everyone’s email addresses? What if the server crashes and I can’t leave any comments? What if Six Apart decides to translate all posts into Newspeak? Doubleplusungood!
A useful feature of LiveJournal, a centralized weblogging service, is the “friends page”: one single location that tracks the most recent posts of everyone I’ve designated as my “friend.” Since every entry is hosted and managed by LiveJournal, a fresh page can be whipped up automatically every time a new post goes live. This sort of setup is very hard to accomplish across decentralized pages (though kwc’s movabletypo has it going).
Weblogs are great at facilitating broad discussions but bad at keeping them going for very long. On most pages, once an entry gets a little old people forget to go back and check for comments. Great discussions die long before their prime just because they fall below the page break. Decentralized solutions like notification emails or post-by-post XML feeds don’t scale well if comments flood people’s inboxes or they have to manage hundreds of feeds in their newsreaders.
I’ve made a hasty mockup of a way that TypeKey could solve this. The server could keep track of every post I comment on using my TypeKey login and build a page that lets me monitor activity on those entries. It could even generate a single XML feed of comments on all the entries I’m watching. I’d only have to go to one place to monitor my online conversations and I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping track of every little discussion I’m interested in.
Six Apart hasn’t announced any plans for this, as at the moment TypeKey is aimed at helping site administrators and not users, but it’s a tool they could certainly offer. I strongly believe that the biggest failing of weblog discussion is that it’s too hard for people to keep track of comments across all the pages they read. A simple, centralized tool could fix all that.