A good couple of months back, I had written about Movable Type’s latest blog script version and about how it can redefine digital publishing. This was so because MT had gone social with MT Pro and made the whole idea of community building simple for publishers. They have no gone a step ahead and launched in Beta – Motion,  a microblogging and social application.

According to the folks at Movable Type, Motion is a Movable Type application you install and run on your web server. Motion will be freely available in early 2009 for any licensed user of Movable Type Pro. This Motion beta test lets our community of partners, developers and customers get an early look.

What Does Motion Do?

Motion like I mentioned is a micro blogging and social script (application). So it powers custom microblogging (Twitter tweets for those who don’t know yet), and other social driven activities, like:

Action Streams

This works like the Facebook newsfeed. So one can display activities anywhere on the web like Flickr, or Youtube, or Twitter or Delicious to share with your visitors and readers.

Multiple Login IDs

Users can sign in with their Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or OpenId providers. The universal login feature helps take away the barrier of registration out for your visitors and users to participate in your community.

Powerful Profiles

Registered members of your site can show their actions from across the web, seamlessly integrated with their actions on your own site. And like Twitter users can follow each other as well.

As one can see, Motion is another step towards the socialization and democratization of publishing online. (is the web going red?). Some of the many uses as suggested by MT as well would be making your own social network (not suggesting you make another Facebook), have a content aggregation service within your community, have a private micro blog say a private customized Yammer, enable mobility within your portal, blog and others in a network.

Motion also essentially answers or rather dismisses the debate of Google and Facebook Connect. A system that has universal features and accepts almost all social sets into its fold is the perfect end to user mobility across systems. And all this is happening on your site, on-your-site. Content, community and collaboration.

It is interesting to note that Six Apart which owns Movable Type had recently acquired Pownce a micro blogging pioneer which never quite caught on and was supposed to shut the service on 15 December. The fact that they have announced the launch of Motion the same day doesn’t seem coincidental to me at least.

Alright, I am a Wordpress fan and I am probably going against my tribe by waxing eloquent of MT, but this year has truly belonged MT if 2007 went to WP. The amount of innovation and given the fact that it has finally gone open source perhaps marks just the beginning of how it can revitalize the online publisher.

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