Six Apart, the company behind blogging platform Movable Type, has just announced a new social application called Motion that integrates social network-like activity streams, microblogging support, and dead simple login functionality for visitors that allows them to quickly leave comments and even tie in their own activity feeds to your site. The new application will be free for all users of Moveable Type Pro, the site’s premium service, once it leaves beta in 2009. For now, you can sign up for a free demo of the Beta version here.
Motion is build around open standards, allowing users to create their own microblogs that pull in events (in a manner similar to FriendFeed) from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart’s Action Streams, which launched earlier this year. The service also offers full support for OpenID, allowing users to login with their Google accounts, Facebook Connect, AOL screen names, and Yahoo IDs.
Six Apart says that Motion isn’t just a set of social features – rather, it’s a flexible suite that you can customize to suit your needs. Among the possible applications:
* Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
* Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
* Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
* Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.
At this point there aren’t any sites that have actually implemented Motion so its hard to get a feel for how well it works, but Six Apart says that they’ll have a demo live some time this evening (we’ll update the post once they do). You can read more about Motion on the application’s product page here.
Very cool
Is this the “reincarnation” of Pounce already?
While Motion obviously borrows a lot of ideas from services like Pownce, the Movable Type team has actually been working on it for the past few months.
Being that Six Apart recently acquired Pounce, it’ll be interesting to see if any similar features are rolled out in the future.
Yay… another microblogging option!
*wretch*
Now even more people with little to say have the chance to say a little.
Agreed! May the avalanche of useless information continue to tumble down the mountain of indifference!
Jon
http://DreamClue.com …get the message!
…continues to tumbl
Great platform
Wow, they’ve already changed some things up. Trying to recreate their own Pownce are they? I’d be interested in seeing what happens next.
It seems to me that they are just afraid of Shout’Em
http://www.shoutem.com
All they need to do is put together a smart re-blogging plugin that ties to existing RSS feeds. MT’s Ben Trott himself put together a prototype called Refeed over a year ago that could have developed into this. They could have made it an official MT plugin that they promise to support into the future, started with simple RSS pulling of Twitter, etc., then start adding features till they’ve got something way cool. Instead, Refeed was a half-assed plugin that few of us have been able to get it working (the comments are full of people appealing for help but Ben’s never bothered to come back).
A little attention and they could have been pioneers instead of trying to (once again) jump on the bandwagon. Here we are with another Movable Type Big Idea with no working demo available only to Pro users.
I’ll take a look when there’s something to look at. In the meantime, I gave up on Refeed and with the idea that MT would connect w/my other social media. In the past year I’ve moved my community site from MT to Ning and my MT-powered personal blog pulls Tumblr in via javascript to provide access to my Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter accounts and I’m off-topic blogging on Tumblr more and more these days. At this point I don’t think I’d look to MT to provide the other functions that Motion promises. But we’ll see.
What’s an “‘em”?
A brain the size of a planet and he still can’t override “smart” quotes.
I put up a very simple demo install of MT Motion here:
http://motion.log.ie
Michele, thanks for setting up the demo site. We’ve got one up at http://www.mova...om/motion_demo/ now as well.
Martin, I’m sorry you’ve been frustrated by your experience with that plugin. Refeed was designed as an as-is hack that people might find useful, which is why it’s not officially supported or part of the core product. That being said, there are commercial reblogging plugins for MT that you can get direct support for if you’re interested.
But Motion is explicitly *not* just a feed republishing app. The vision is that there is much more than needs to be aggregated from your presence across the web, with specific connections to understand what information is valuable on each service.
Also, it is just as much about being able to form two-way connections to all of these different sites. Simply pulling in the feeds from those other sites ignores the value of the community that you’ve connected to on each of them. I think that part of Motion’s guiding principles is perhaps one of the most exciting parts.
In short, this is the beginning of something more ambitious as a vision for independent social networks. There simply isn’t *any* way to do this with any other tools out there. I think it’s extremely pioneering to have abilities that nobody else has, instead of simply reblogging, which our tools and many others have offered for a long time.
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