Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type, have introduced an add-on that turns Movable Type into a social networking platform. 

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. 

According to Six Apart, “We looked at the most compelling social sites across the web, from Twitter to Tumblr, Pownce to FriendFeed, and more. And then we built an application around open standards to offer you the best features of each of these services, on your own site.”

Here are some of the things that Motion will let Movable Type users do:

• 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.

2009 is shaping up to be a the year social networking explodes. WordPress has already announced plans for a social networking add-on, BuddyPress.

Motion is in beta now. 

Features:

 

• Rich Microblogging – It’s easy to post text, links, images, audio or embedded video with just a click.
• Action Streams – Collect and share your actions from across the web, from dozens of supported services including popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, and Digg.
• Sign in with any web account – Your community members can authenticate with their existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. Now there are half a billion web users who can comment or vote on your content without hitting a registration barrier.
• Powerful Profiles – Motion profiles don’t just show your name and picture. Any registered member of your site can show their actions from across the web, seamlessly integrated with their actions on your own site. And of course they can follow other members of your community as well.