ReadWriteWeb

These days, it's no longer enough to have an inviting storefront and amazing products on your shelves, whether physical or digital. Fueled by social media, with which even the search engines scrambling to keep up, the Web is now happening in real time. How can a small company stay competitive?

One critical component of the answer to that question is something that most businesses have never had to consider doing in the past: become a publisher.

In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.