Six Apart Reveals ‘Community Solution,’ Social Networking In A Box
Six Apart is putting the social network in a pre-wrapped box. Now your company can have its own social network as an extension of a Movable Type package. Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type and Typepad, have announced a new commercial product dubbed, Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS).
Judging by the press release MTCS is aimed at commercial users and won’t be free. The company claims that MTCS is “a complete, out-of-the-box social media solution that enables the quick and easy deployment of online communities.”
Presumably you login to your Movable Type account and then enable the social networking features you want to use — communities, forums, etc — though at the moment details are thin.
We’re not big fans of one size fits all development (typically it ends up being more, one size fits a few, but needs some serious hacking to do what you want it to do), and that’s doubly true of social networks where the feature set is often best developed in response to the community rather than simply using by-the-book features.
Still if you’re looking to add some social networking features to an existing commercial MT site, this could be an easy way to go and might work well for simpler things — like, say, a forum for customer feedback or the like.
Other options in this realm include Ning, which allows you to build and customize your own social network, picking a choosing from a pre-built set of options.
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