Six Apart’s Moveable Type blogging platform is  getting a new social networking add-on, called Motion, which will become generally available in early 2009.  Motion is currently in Beta today, and can be downloaded explicitly for non-production use.  Details on how the new platform will work are a little sparse, but according to the official company blog, bloggers like myself are supposed to think about it this way:

• Microblogging like Pownce or Tumblr or Twitter plus
• Activity streams like FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse plus
• Really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect

The primary use case for Motion appears to be for those who run smaller community sites that want to aggregate content from their users (micro blogs, social bookmarking, content sharing, etc.), allowing them to leverage their social networks of preference — OpenID, Google Friend Connect,  Facebook Connect and others — while contributing to the community site.  Since Motion is built on open standards, it will be easy to keep it in sync with the latest-and-greatest social computing services on the web as they emerge.

I’ve been often asked about the viability of Moveable Type as an internal-focused corporate social networking platform.  The answer? It’s getting better all the time.  What’s been really impressive about MoveableType is how it has grown out of a simple blogging platform into a more capable, almost corporate portal-like system.  It’s really happened outside of the radar of the big players in enterprise portal software (IBM, Microsoft and Oracle).

Integration with LDAP? Check.  Role-based management and delegated administration? Check and check. Support for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database?  Check.  Scalability?  Eh, it could be better, but… I’ll give it a pass.  Check.

So what do I find so amusing about MoveableType?  It’s all written in Perl (and to a lesser degree, PHP).  Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love Perl.  I started my web development career writing applications in Perl.  But the fact that MoveableType still uses Perl, especially when Ruby on Rails, Python and even PHP are more on the bleeding edge of the “hype” curve in terms of web development languages, is probably the only thing that makes me just a tad bit hesitant to call it an “enterprise class” social computing technology.

If you can’t find folks that know how to hack apart Perl like crazy, then buying and deploying MoveableType will be a little nerve-wracking, or potentially costly to maintain depending on what your customization needs are and who you can find to do it for you.  And the thing I think is probably of most concern: how long will MoveableType be able to remain on top with new features while the pool of available Perl developers continues to dwindle?  At some point they’ll probably need to port over to something that is more broadly well-known by developers, should the demand for their software expand to a broader market.

Really, it’s just about the only bad thing I can say about MoveableType.  If more people catch on to the utility and quality of MoveableType, I’m sure Six Apart will find a way to address this problem and continue to build a solid blogging and social computing platform.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Product Management, Social Computing