As we are about to launch the widget version of the Actics concept very shortly at Actics.com, we have naturally been discussing the issue of centralized vs. distributed community a lot. A couple of recent blog posts seem to support my intuition about the development toward more distributed services. So, as a kind of ‘trailer’ preceding our launch, allow me to briefly present the case for distributed communities that Actics will also support.

Fred Stutzman recently argued for designers of social networking software (SNS) to adopt OpenID to bypass the problem of achieving critical mass on your SNS to get the social going. There’s a lot of network effects (no wonder) and rich-get-richer in social networks, and you simply cannot push everybody on to new sites however great they might be. So, you should simply connect them between their present ‘homes’. OpenID is a new standard offering cross media authentication and ID management. In this context it means basically providing for socializing across different SNS’ (being friends, sending/leaving messages, logging visiting friends from other SNS’ etc). Stutzman’s compelling analogy is allowing people to mail other recipients than gmail users when using gmail yourself.

Today Steve Poland of Vested Ventures writes on TechCrunch:

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Poland’s argument is very much in line with Stutzman (and he actually already voiced it back in June) and what I havce been arguing in Actics. Why not provide cross media socialization? This should be equally obvious as cross service mailing or cross carrier phone calling. People are more than ‘Studying’ at Facebook, ‘Music’ at MySpace and ‘Ethics’ at Actics.com. There’s something quite old fashioned provincially local about the big social sites refusing things like OpenID. ‘Go ahead and socialize as much as you like - but only in our silo’. People are signed up to all sorts of sites due to chance, timing or personal taste. But that shouldn’t keep them from forming all sorts of communities across their different ‘villages’. This is simple web-globalization.

Naturally, I also agree with Stutzman and Poland’s expectation to see an explosion of services offering cross-media socializing soon. And MySpace, FaceBook and the other major players to support these services in order not to loose members expecting this new natural freedom offered at the next social site. Distributed communities seem such a natural development. And all the talk about widgets the last couple of months is an indicator of this as well.

Back to our coming widget; we simply want to give people the option of engaging their proxies in ethical dialogue in their own meaningful setting, be it a blog, webpage or SNS profile page, rather than dragging all their online and offline friends, families, and readers to Actics.com. For a lot of users, stating and getting feedback on their ethical ideals and activities is simply more interesting in the context of their existing online activities rather than on another new community. Especially as Actics is still new. However, we will still develop a ‘local’ community at Actics.com (launched next year) for those wanting to dig deeper and get more ethical leverage (wait and see!). But if the widget really does support the distributed communities processes we hope for, we’ll roll out a lot support for across the web inter-member engagement via the widget infrastructure. Exciting I think!