Movable Type 4.2, Wordpress becoming social platforms
Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 (download from CNET) and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro. Movable Type Pro will enable "social publishing," which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments.
Six Apart also has added an aggregation widget called "Action Streams," that allows bloggers to automatically pull in their activity on other sites, like Twitter or Flickr. It's like FriendFeed, but with all the control and formatting you'd expect of a modern blogging widget. The power of a blog is its network of users, and Web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation. Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging. So it's appropriate the these products are getting new social features.
