Movable Type 4.0 Announced - Becomes Social Media Platform
Six Apart is announcing today the beta release of Movable Type 4, a much anticipated upgrade to a blog platform that has two distinct user bases nowadays - consumer base (like R/WW, which uses MT) and Enterprise.
Context & Ripple Effects
Six Apart is repositioning Movable Type on two fronts at once: today's beta announcement recasts the platform as social media software rather than a blog engine, and a companion report says the platform will be open sourced. That second move matters because Movable Type's licensing model has been the main wedge in the WordPress vs. Movable Type comparison, where free WordPress has been gaining ground.
The company arrives here from a mixed run of form: it bought the feed reader startup Rojo in September 2006 — technology that now looks relevant to a social push — but its hosted TypePad service suffered repeated reliability problems through late 2005, including a widely reported outage that left bloggers stranded. Meanwhile distribution had already widened when Yahoo began offering Movable Type to its bloggers in December 2005.
First-order effects
- Six Apart's two existing bases — consumer publishers like R/WW and enterprise customers — get one platform pitched at both, replacing the split between Movable Type licenses and hosted TypePad.
- The same-day open-sourcing decision removes the paid-license objection that has favored WordPress in head-to-head comparisons, forcing the choice onto features rather than price.
Second-order effects
- WordPress faces direct feature competition in community and social functionality for the first time, since the incumbent professional-blogging platform (per 2005 coverage, the most popular software for professional blogs) is now chasing the same users at a zero license price.
- Assets like Rojo's feed reading and search technology become candidate building blocks inside the platform, letting Six Apart bundle subscription and discovery features that standalone blogging tools lack.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, blog vendors stop selling publishing software and start competing as social media suites, with hosting reliability — TypePad's documented weak point — becoming the differentiator that decides which platforms enterprises trust.
- Open sourcing a formerly licensed flagship signals that per-seat blog licensing is structurally untenable against free alternatives, pushing revenue toward services, support, and enterprise deployments.
The trend: Blogging platforms are expanding from publishing tools into social media suites, with open sourcing eroding license-based business models and shifting competition to features and hosted reliability.