Yesterday Pownce closed its doors and Six Apart, who acquired Pownce’s technology and developers, launched its new platform Motion. Motion is a microblogging platform that pulls many of the best in class features that can be found in Pownce, Tumblr and FriendFeed. It is currently in beta but will be freely available to Movable Type Pro users in early 2009.

There are a number of features that have us really excited about this new platform. Motion sets itself apart early by promoting itself as an application that can be installed on any webserver. This is an important feature as it also clearly defines ownership of the content and as we have observed with Pownce users want to be able to save and repurpose their content even after the service goes offline.

Adding to the feature list, Motion is built around open standards. This will allow the platform to pull in other content, similar to FriendFeed, from any site that is supported by Six Apart’s Action Streams which they launched earlier in 2008.

It’s openness does not end there. Motion is also promoting a variety of ways to sign in such as OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. In doing so, this instantly opens the number of users who can participate in the site.

With like platforms such as Tumblr and FriendFeed still seaching for a business model, Motion has the makings to be a major competitor in the microblogging arena. Adding the ability to host on your own and supporting open standards are sure to increase use and hopefully drive the simplicity of microblogging to the same level as blogging.