Multi-blog solutions: WPMU or WP-Hive?

Some years ago, I first started to kick around with Wordpress Multi-User, aka WPMU. In the last few months, I've been exposed to the most excellent plug-in WP-Hive. At first glance, these two seem to do the same thing: allow you to host multiple wordpress blogs on one installation -- one codebase and one database. And both products are excellent. So, how is one to choose? MU is maintained by the same fine people who make Wordpress; it's an "official" version of Wordpress, oriented toward networks with multiple blogs. MU is a completely separate product from Wordpress, though, with it's own separate versions and it's own installation process. It's been around for years, several large professional blog networks use it (wordpress.com being the most obvious), and it has a large and active (albeit sometimes a bit rude) community to help. WP-Hive was developed and is maintained by Mr. John Sessford, aka ikailo. It's a plug-in for Wordpress, rather than a completely separate beast. Basically, it manages incoming requests, and routes them through one installation of Wordpress, directing it to the appropriate tables in the database, based on the URL being requested. It's an extremely elegant solution, especially compared to the rather large install that is MU. The basic idea on how each works is similar, and when you look at the databases created by each, they have fairly similar structures as well. Both use unique prefixes to keep the Wordpress tables for each of your blogs separate. If you had a blog called foo, and it was your first blog in a series of blogs, where a normal Wordpress install would have a table called wp_comments, for example, WPMU would have wp_1_comments and WP-Hive would have foo_comments. Both WPMU and WP-Hive (in its most recent release) support blogs of the form http://foo.example.com/ and of the form http://www.example.com/foo/. So, differences? WPMU has more support for individual administration of blogs. You can, for example, make it possible for visitors to your website to click on a link to start a new blog on your WPMU site. WPMU is the better solution when you're working with a larger community or network of individual bloggers -- for example, a blog site for a school, where any student can log in and start their own blog. WP-Hive is leaner and more focused. And it allows you to run multiple domains off the same install. You could, for example, have example.com and foo.com run off the same wordpress installation, with completely different blogs, using WP-Hive. If you're a lone blogger who wants to run multiple blogs on the same host, or a small community of people (like a small business or a family) that wants to each administer their own blogs, then I think that WP-Hive is definitely more up your alley.