Movable Type.org

As we started to show with Movable Type Pro last week, blogging is evolving to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web; merging publishing with community. Since the release of Movable Type 4.0 last year, we've built in native support for technologies like OpenID and now OAuth, to make it even easier for people to bring parts of their profile with them when they come to your blog. Last month we demoed integration of Facebook Connect with Movable Type which continues to make this vision a reality, though it isn't enough to integrate with just one social network.

mixi is Japan's most popular social network (one in five Japanese web users use mixi) and earlier this week they launched support for OpenID. Six Apart's Japan team participated in this launch and we are now shipping a plugin to make it easy for mixi users to interact with Movable Type powered communities. The mixiComment plugin brings the community of mixi to your site, giving commenters an even better experience by signing in using their mixi OpenID. Even better, the user interface takes advantage of new features in OpenID 2.0 so that normal people don't even need to know what OpenID is; instead just click a button to login with their mixi account. Just like Facebook Connect, this makes it easier for a wide range of people to participate on your site by being less work for them to sign in while allowing them to bring pieces of their profile with them all over the web.

You can download the mixiComment plugin from our plugin directory and easily add support for the largest social network in Japan to your blog.