More TypeKey Info

Well, the cat’s on its way out of the bag about TypeKey. Yesterday I figured out that TypePad members can use their logins for the new service. They can then go and use their TypeKey identities to comment on pages running MovableType 3.0 beta.

With your login, you can also go into TypeKey and set up your profile and account preferences. (Again, TypePad users can use their current login and password. New users can sign up for new accounts.) For TypePad users, all the fields will already be filled in with your personal information. Using the new nickname feature, you can decide to have your full name or nickname displayed when you leave a comment. The Profile Page settings let you build a public TypeKey profile. Here’s mine. The options are: photo, email address, one-line bio, my websites, and sites I enjoy. I have not included the last two options on my profile because they’re a little broken right now. The fields come automatically filled out with information from your TypeLists, which is a handy idea, but at the moment it’s a little buggy. It seems to like to fill out one field for every list item you’ve ever entered into a link list and it repopulates them if you delete them. I can’t fault them for this of course, since TypeKey is still in testing and they haven’t announced TypePad functionality yet. Once it works properly it’ll be neat to have your blogroll already imported.

The feature that was really clever of Six Apart is that, though login names have to be unique, nicknames do not. If you want to be “sexkitten69” or “toker420” or “31337h4x0r” when you leave comments, you can set that to your nickname no matter how many other people have it, too. This will solve the handle scramble problem that happens when new services pop up.

TypeKey is Live for TypePad Users

Via Dive Into Mark, I hopped over to Idly’s MT 3.0b1 First Thoughts. Since MovableType 3.0 is in beta, it makes sense that they’re doing some major testing on TypeKey, their new comment registration system. Noticing that Idly has a TypeKey notice on his comment form, I clicked the link to see if I could sign up. I filled out the form and got an error message informing me that someone was already using my login name. This upset me, being that I’m the ruling daveXtreme in cyberspace.

Turns out that all TypePad users’ login names have been reserved for use in TypeKey, and I was able to log in using my TypePad password.

This was probably a good call by Six Apart, as TypePad is aimed at beginner users who would be confused and upset if they had to maintain different sets of identities for using their own site and commenting on others’. Yay for integration.

I guess privacy-skiddish people might be upset by being automatically thrown into the system, but since Six Apart already has all their contact information from their TypePad bill, they’ll just need to get over it.

TypeKey and the Benefits of Centralization

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.