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A few months ago, we announced that we were opening the social graph and invited others to join us. An effort like that encompasses many different technology projects and all kinds of different companies; in just a few months the idea of opening up social networks has received a lot of attention. Today we're excited to share an amazing new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web and we're the first to bring this sort of functionality to free and open source blogging tools.

It's worth revisiting some of the successes the openness movement has accomplished in just the past few months: Google's OpenSocial released new versions of its APIs and we hosted a wildly successful hackathon to help support the creation of new widgets for the standard. OpenID 2.0 shipped and both Google and Yahoo! are now supporting OpenID, bringing hundreds of millions of new IDs to the community. The group DataPortability.org was formed and released a video reinforcing these themes around openness. And finally, we've made good on our promise to let you show off all the services you belong to, with TypePad and Vox automatically letting you list your accounts around the web on your blogs using Microformats to link to your profiles. And as of today, the same ability is available for Movable Type.

As we explained half a year ago, we're on a mission. Like we said then, blogs change the way we communicate. Just like with TrackBack, OpenID, opening the social graph, and so much else in blogging, we're hoping that we can influence everyone else to follow our lead and move blogging forward with us. Bringing your actions around the web under your control is a fundamental next step to making all of our blogs even more powerful and expressive.

However, the overall value of these companies is still largely based on growth potential, which now seems shaky. Microsoft's investment in Facebook valued the company at a massive $15 billion. But in November, Twitter refused to be bought by Facebook for a reported $500 million of its stocks plus some cash.

Chris Alden, chairman and CEO of Six Apart, says that there simply isn't enough capital in the current market to sustain so many social-networking companies. "You'll see more consolidation in the next year or two," he predicts.

In October, the third most popular social-networking site, Hi5, announced that it would cut between 10 and 15 percent of its staff. And in November, the business-focused networking sites LinkedIn and Jive said that they would slash their workforces by 10 and 40 percent, respectively.