Six Apart, makers of TypePad and Movable Type, has added a new horse to its stable of blogging software. Motion, as the new tools are known, is built on the old Pownce platform, the microblogging service Six Apart purchased earlier this year.

Motion is a distributed microblogging service designed to be hosted on your own server. Intended to be a more customizable, but still easy-to-use, version of Pownce, Motion is a bit like turning your website into your own personalized FriendFeed.

The front end of the service — the look, feel and other options — is hosted locally on your own server, while the actual data Motion pulls in is stored on Six Apart’s servers, which, presumably, can handle heavy traffic better than most cheap web hosting options.

Motion can both push and pull updates to and from services like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace, much the way the old Pownce site pulled in RSS feeds, images, movies and other data from a host of outside websites.

So what’s the difference between Motion and Pownce? Well, Motion is software that you download and install yourself, rather than a purely hosted service like Pownce. While you’re still dependent on Six Apart to store and serve up the actual content, the look and feel of your Motion-based site is much more customizable, and of course the URL is your own.

To see what you can do with Motion, check out Six Apart’s Motion-powered demo website.

If hosting your own software isn’t your idea of fun, Six Apart says that down the road it plans to offer some hosting options for Motion. There are also plans to eventually integrate Motion into Typepad, the company’s hosted blogging platform.

Motion isn’t the only thing Six Apart has unveiled this week, the company is also offering up a new set of APIs that will allow developers to access TypePad data from just about anywhere.

The TypePad Developer Program, as the new collection of APIs is known, is designed to make it easier to do more with your TypePad data. For example, if you’re itching to turn your TypePad-powerd site into a Facebook application, the new APIs would allow you access all your TypePad data — including the social network tools like friend lists, profiles and groups — and make it available to a Facebook application.

Both Motion and the TypePad Developer Program are free. You can grab Motion from the Six Apart site and find out more about the TypePad Developer Program on the developer site.

See Also:

• Pownce: Micro-Blogging Social Network Goes Public
• TypePad Takes On Disqus, WordPress With New Distributed Comment System
• Six Apart Reveals ‘Community Solution,’ Social Networking In A Box

Google recently added support for extensions to its Chrome web browser. But as any Firefox add-on junky can tell you, those bells and whistles for your browser don’t always behave perfectly, so you need way to manage them. That’s why Google has introduced a new extension manager to the development builds of Google Chrome.

If you’ve got the latest development build of Chrome installed, just point a new window or tab to the url chrome://extensions and you’ll get a very basic, but functional extension manager.

The extensions URL is not nearly as refined or useful as what you’ll get in Firefox, but for an early build it covers the basics like enabling, disabling, updating and uninstalling extensions.

You’ll notice one significant feature missing from that list, namely, finding new extensions. Because Chrome extensions are still a very experimental feature, installing them isn’t currently possible from the extension manager. Luckily, installing extensions in Chrome is usually just a matter of clicking an install link.

Finding them is another matter. The obvious problem with Chrome extension is that there aren’t very many of them. Google has a page with some sample extensions and a few outside resources like the website Chrome Plugins are tracking extensions, but so far there’s no easy-to-browse central repository along the lines of Mozilla’s Firefox Add-ons website.

However, as the new extension manager shows, Google is hard at work on the extension system in Chrome. Once the APIs and developer tools start to become stable, look for developers to get serious about building Chrome extensions. Hopefully, at some point, Google will build a site to host them all.

See Also:

• Google Chrome Closes in on Firefox With Official Extension Support
• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Chrome Hits 3.0, Mac Version Due Later This Year

Delicious has announced some refinements to its recently redesigned homepage that make the bookmarking site an even more useful tool for tracking the real-time web.

Among the new features is the ability to narrow any search down to spans of a mere five minutes. While it’s not for everyone, if you’re trying to find better ways to filter the fire hose of information that is real-time data, Delicious’ new search tool is an easy way to do it.

There’s also a very cool new interactive graph for filtering bookmarks around larger chunks of time. For example, if you wanted to see all your bookmarks added on this day last year, just click the interactive graph, select the start and end points and then click the search button to narrow the results.

While narrowing by time is hardly a new feature, the graphical interface is considerably more intuitive (and cooler) than simply plugging your dates in a text field. If nothing else, it’s a nice example of how much careful attention to interface design can improve a website.

In fact, the new Delicious seems to have something of fetish for charts and graphs. Charts also appear on each link’s “count” page, showing who has bookmarked it. For example, the Webmonkey homepage has been bookmarked over 5500 times, but the new chart (click the chart icon to see it) reveals a huge spike in June 2008 shortly after we relaunched the site.

Delicious’ new charts aren’t limited to the site either. There’s a new “Tagometer” widget that allows you to embed a chart on your own pages showing the number of saves over time and the most frequently-used tags. Right now you’ll need to cut-and-paste some JavaScript into your pages, but it probably won’t be long before someone creates a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms.

The final change Delicious has unveiled is an iPhone-optimized mobile site. The site is geared toward making it easier to bookmark pages on the iPhone, so you can read them later. While we prefer Instapaper for that sort of thing, the Delicious mobile site has other options — like quickly browsing recent bookmarks — which heavy users will appreciate.

See Also:

• Revamped Delicious Turns to Twitter for Real-Time Search
• Send Web Video to Boxee With Delicious Bookmarks
• Delicious Gets New Look, Loses Dots

Mozilla has updated Weave, its free add-on for Firefox that lets you synchronize all your personal data across the various Firefox installations you have running on your work PC, your home PCs and your mobile phone.

The big news in the latest Weave update (now at version 0.7, which can be downloaded from Mozilla), is support for incremental downloads, which means Weave now sends your data in smaller chunks to cut down on bandwidth and memory. The result is a much sleeker Weave experience that won’t leave you wondering why your browser is suddenly so slow. The update seems to have also solved Weave’s rather annoying habit of occasionally taking forever to log in to the server.

In addition to the incremental downloads, Mozilla says Weave 0.7 has some other performance tweaks and sync reliability improvements up its sleeve, though the announcement doesn’t offer any specifics. As always, this Weave update includes the usual slew of bug fixes.

Weave still doesn’t offer complete support for syncing everything — add-ons are the major missing component — but it certainly makes it easier to keep your various Firefox installations in sync. If you’d like to take Weave for a spin, head over to the Mozilla Labs website and grab a copy (requires Firefox 3.5 or better).

See Also:

• Weave Update for Firefox Syncs Your Web Identity
• Mozilla Revamps Labs Site, Reminds Us Weave Exists
• Mozilla’s Weave Ties Your Desktop and Your Personal Web Together

If you’ve been thinking Google’s recently unveiled Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer might be the answer to all the web’s IE pains, well, you might want to think twice.

Mozilla’s Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver says Google’s Chrome plug-in for IE is a bad idea. In a post on his personal blog, Shaver expresses his belief that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit. Shaver argues that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy.

The controversy surrounds Google’s recently announced open-source plug-in for IE called Google Chrome Frame. Chrome Frame can be used to automatically force IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like Canvas and embedded audio and video.

On the surface it sounds like a great way to get offer Internet Explorer users a way to enjoy the modern web — the Chrome Frame plug-in makes HTML5 tools work and renders pages according to web standards. However, while Chrome Frame might look good to web developers tired of dealing with Internet Explorer’s wonky rendering and antiquated feature set, Shaver doesn’t believe Chrome Frame is the answer. Rather, he thinks the far better solution would be to convince users of IE 6 or IE 7 to simply upgrade to the Chrome browser itself.

According to Shaver, “running Chrome Frame within IE makes many of the browser application’s features non-functional, or less effective.” He points out that using Chrome Frame in IE partially disables the browser’s private browsing mode and other security controls.

In a follow-up e-mail with Webmonkey, Shaver says his concerns are not so much “surface attacks” that Microsoft lashed out against, but rather how users will react.

Part of the problem he believes lies with the decision to allow site developers to trigger the Chrome Frame, which means users never get to know which browser is actually in control.

Shaver thinks the confusion such a situation creates will adversely affect users, pointing out a number of possibly confusing scenarios:

Will they get anti-phishing indications that they understand?

Is the dialog telling them about a problem from their browser, from the injected rendering engine, or from a spoofing site?

If they permit a site to know their location, is that being sent by the same rules as when they answered that on another site, with a different-looking dialog?

Do they understand what browser they’re using when getting support?

Are they really in private browsing mode?

Are they mad at Microsoft or Google if it crashes?

He also points out that many people who are forced to use IE 6 do so because they have no control over what software they use — for example a corporate network where system admins control the software that’s installed. In that situation, it’s unlikely users would be able to install Chrome Frame anyway.

See Also:

• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Google Chrome Closes in on Firefox With Official Extension Support
• Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely