From the I-should-have-blogged-about-this-literally-a-month-ago department, AIM OpenID Login has been released as part of Six Apart’s Motion package. That was a mouthful, so allow me to unpack the sentence.
AIM OpenID Login is a small plugin I wrote in 2007 that lets anyone with an AOL account – including AIM users – easily log into your Movable Type blog to post a comment. Motion is a plugin for Movable Type that turns the blogging software into a social networking platform. It’s currently a public beta, so you can download it for free while Six Apart works to smooth out the edges. According to the FAQ, its features – including, presumably, AIM OpenID Login – will be folded into the standard Movable Type application by version 4.25.
Early last month, a product manager at Six Apart e-mailed to notify me that my plugin would be incorporated into a future Movable Type release. He did not ask my permission. As it happens, I’d already given explicit permission by licensing the plugin under the GNU General Public License, as I was required to. So this e-mail was simply a courteous heads-up. As you might imagine, I’m quite pleased that one late night of coding has led to such visibility for my code. If only I got such a high ROI with this week’s complement of problem sets.
Even if you have no inclination to turn your blog into a full-fledged social networking service, AIM OpenID Login lowers a barrier that keeps your readers from becoming commenters.
Minh, we're really excited to include your AIM OpenID Login with Motion, and it seems particularly appropriate that an app that's designed to connect the web together is going to feature contributions from community members like yourself. :)
We've been blogging a lot about these ideas (that post is about TypePad, but mentions MT and Motion as well), and it seems like this stuff is really catching on!