TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

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This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards.

TypePad Platform and Developer Program

The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden in a blog post wrote that this will also benefit bloggers, whether they’re part of a business or organization that uses TypePad for online publications or individual bloggers who share their life with a close circle of friends and family.

For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects.

Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program website to obtain an alpha version of the TypePad API for free, with commercial versions of the TypePad Platform set to debut later on. Time will tell if the initiative will end up creating an ecosystem of third-party developers much like rival Automattic has managed to assemble for WordPress over the years.

TypePad Motion

Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities to TypePad, but is now switching to full throttle with the launch of TypePad Motion. The new service is the inaugural open source app built by Six Apart developers for the new TypePad platform and incorporates many of the features of the late Pownce. It’s also reminiscent of Jaiku, Tumblr and the recently introduced Yahoo Meme service.

The service is already live here, so I played around with it a little and found that it was far from anything remotely spectacular in terms of functionality or wealth of features. You log on with your Typepad account and add text (no character limit, links, photos, online videos and audio) to your Motion profile. Other community members can subscribe to your new blog and comment much like any other microblogging / lifestreaming service. That’s about it, although the open-source aspect is interesting for the future.

Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python using the Django framework (GitHub). An example of a customized Motion blog is this showcase for the Future of Web Apps conference where the above announcements were made today.

A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take?

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Squarespace’s new blog importing tool supports most of the main publishing platforms; Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type. After entering your login credentials, the Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. Squarespace is also working directly with Amazon S3 — Squarespace will bring all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to Squarespace’s Amazon S3 account. For users who want to retain custom domains, Squarespace will use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts automatically.

Squarespace’s founder, Anthony Casalena tells us that Squarespace submitted an iPhone application to the App Store two weeks ago, which hasn’t been approved yet and should be coming “soon.” Also, this is the only current way to exit a self-hosted site right now. This importing tool is a big plus for any blogger wanting to move over to Squarespace, because you keep your SEO and page ranks, as well as all your content.

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Besides Six Apart, Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol on the web.

According to Recordon, Facebook has always been built on open source software, has released powerful open source infrastructure technologies such as Thrift, and this year become an active member of the Activity Streams and OpenID communities from a standards side. So Recordon will continue to focus on open source and standards at Facebook.

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If you’re a TypePad user, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. And you can just as easily push the content back out to other services such as Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed while you’re at it, which is entirely in line with what Posterous has been all about since its inception. To complement the new feature, Six Apart is also adding some new custom themes to TypePad, starting with the Pico template the company introduced yesterday.

The only difference with Posterous that I can see is the support and training Six Apart provides with its TypePad service and the fact that you can add advertising units to your new mini-blog, although I can’t imagine this will convince many individuals to actually pay for a microblogging service when there are so many free alternatives.

Or will it?

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The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board.

From what we can gather reading about the project on the website, its founders are passionate about Movable Type but see more value in forking it, community-style, “to see it flourish as a platform”. According to the FAQ section, the team is working together with Six Apart to some degree – which isn’t surprising considering Dash’ presence on the board – and strives for as much compatibility with Movable Type’s core APIs as possible. However, you can also read that the team is inspired by successful open source initiatives such as WordPress (a Six Apart rival), Apache, Linux and Firefox.

“While at its onset Melody will have a great deal in common with Movable Type from a feature perspective, we believe that by listening to and empowering our community we will unlock the true potential of open source and begin to advance the platform at a more rapid pace. To that end we intend on decoupling features that add complexity to the product, yet only a minority of users use, e.g. TrackBack and Postgres support, and increasing the level of investment in those areas that will help people become more efficient and successful in designing and building web sites using Melody, like theme building and distribution.”

As for the product, it’s not ready yet, even for beta testing. The first release (Melody 1.0) is scheduled for ‘Fall 2009′, but if you’re a developer and you can’t hold your horses than you should check out the latest development snapshot from Melody’s source code repository on Github.

Behind Melody: Tim Appnel, Jesse Gardner, Dan Wolfgang, Mark Stosberg, Jay Allen, Su, Arvind Satyanarayn and Byrne Reese.

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Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

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The micro-sharing application was launched the same year in private beta and became somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (which was nowhere near as popular as it is nowadays) and Pownce (which never really took off and was ultimately put out of its misery by Six Apart). Jaiku was famously acquired by Google at the end of 2007 before it hit mainstream success and has since often been cited as one of the search engine company’s infamous zombie acquisitions, with little or no further development happening on the service since the takeover and the original founders moving on to doing other things on the company’s payroll.

Then Google discontinued a number of services in the beginning of this year, and Jaiku was widely reported to be one of the axed products, but Engeström swiftly responded to those reports with a blog post saying that Jaiku wasn’t dying but instead morphing (into an open-source platform for building micro-publishing services on Google App Engine).

Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are.

(sorry about the occasional sound glitches)

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What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

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Six Apart, the company behind blogging platform Movable Type, has just announced a new social application called Motion that integrates social network-like activity streams, microblogging support, and dead simple login functionality for visitors that allows them to quickly leave comments and even tie in their own activity feeds to your site. The new application will be free for all users of Moveable Type Pro, the site’s premium service, once it leaves beta in 2009. For now, you can sign up for a free demo of the Beta version here.

Motion is build around open standards, allowing users to create their own microblogs that pull in events (in a manner similar to FriendFeed) from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart’s Action Streams, which launched earlier this year. The service also offers full support for OpenID, allowing users to login with their Google accounts, Facebook Connect, AOL screen names, and Yahoo IDs.

Six Apart says that Motion isn’t just a set of social features – rather, it’s a flexible suite that you can customize to suit your needs. Among the possible applications:

* Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
* Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
* Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
* Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.

At this point there aren’t any sites that have actually implemented Motion so its hard to get a feel for how well it works, but Six Apart says that they’ll have a demo live some time this evening (we’ll update the post once they do). You can read more about Motion on the application’s product page here.

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This is not a comprehensive blog directory like Technorati or even a meme tracker like Techmeme.  It will launch covering only 1,200 blogs. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tells me that his goal is not to compete with other blog directories so much as to offer a service that will help blogs in general (because that helps Six Apart as a provider of blogging software).

How good is it?  We don’t know because we haven’t played with it yet. But judging from some screenshots that we did obtain, it looks like a fairly standard media hub.  It breaks up the blogosphere into business, entertainment, news & politics, life, technology (shouldn’t that be first?), student life (yawn), and top 10 lists.  On its homepage, it will highlights posts from each of the categories, as well as one big write-up focussed on the hot discussion topic of the day..  

Given that blogs.com generates a ton of natural traffic based on its URL alone, it should provide yet one more way to get a traffic boost for the blogs that are featured.  (Just don’t expect a massive Yahoo Buzz-type boost any time soon).

Here are the screenshots.  The home page:

The Entertainment Section:

And a top ten blog list:

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The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Facebook’s press release is here.

Live Coverage

In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet.

2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over.

2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says.

2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook.

2:46 PM: They’re announcing two new programs: a verification program is first – this is the lower tier of the two programs. Starting in September they will invite apps that are secure, respectful and transparent to apply to be verified. Trusted apps get a special badge in the directory and app page. (we posted on this earlier, here)

2:44 PM: They have partnerships with partners to help developer (Microsoft), host and scale. They are launching a new developer website that gives all the information needed for a quick start. He says 1000 apps have been submitted to the Facebook fund. They are revealing the names of fbFund’s recipients to date: Challenge, ConnectedWeddings, Podclass, MyListo, Trazzler, Zimride, LuckyCal, Coursefeed, Hotberry, and J2Play.

They are announcing a new competition today. $2M will be given out over the next two months. Facebook will select 25 finalists who will each get 25k. Users will vote on finalists who will each get 250k.

2:43 PM: He says they must keep the ecosystem safe for users and fair for developers. A year ago equal distribution became overwhelming to users, then they made restrictive changes that hurt apps. Going forward they will have different rules. They are announcing several programs to help app developers. Get Started Quickly tools like adding easy FBML tags.

2:42 PM: He says that they’ve learned a lot in the last year, as they’ve had lots of challenges. Facebook is listening to the community. They’re trying to partner more closely with developers. He says they are making organizational changes that let developers incorporate feedback during the dev process, and they’re creating full time community management organization

2:40 PM: “Security is a big part of it, apps can’t share information with other users unless they obey privacy settings. Apps must also be respectful of the users attention and time. Don’t make users invite 20 friends before you use the app, or spam friends without them knowing. Apps must be very transparent. Users should get what they expect when they click, not an interstitial ad. Design is also important – clean design is a must. And apps must be fast loading and responsive. As the apps get faster, users use them more. Apps need to focus on being robust and scaling properly as they grow.”

2:39 PM: “Building trustworthy applications is important because we live in an ecosystem with network effects. If users leave, everyone suffers. Apps must be safe and trusted.”

2:37 PM: He says apps must be useful. The carpool app is great example, which lets users find carpool buddies. “Apps must also be expressive”- The graffiti app that lets users draw on friends profiles, is a good example. Finally, meaningful apps must be engaging. He says Playfish makes games that are highly engaging. Facebook users have played over 900 million minutes of Playfish games. That’s about 1800 years.

2:35 PM: Benjamin is announcing “guiding principles for great applications” which are based on dialog with community. It’s based on three pillars: meaningful, trustworthy and well designed. The best apps make use of the social graph. Applications must be social. A good example is the Lil Green Patch app, which helps users fight global warming by interacting with other users.

2:33 PM: Benjamin Ling, Director of Platform Program Management is now on stage talking about the “State of Platform.” He says that over $200m has been invested in Facebook apps, $34m this week alone. Additionally, 13 different ad networks have launched that pay out tens of millions of dollars to app developers. He says, “venture capital, ad networks, developers and academics are the ecosystem that makes Facebook platform a success.”

2:32 PM: Mark wraps things up, that appears to be the end of the announcements.

2:31 PM: Zuckerberg asked all Facebook employees who work on platform to stand up, then asked all app developers to stand up.

2:29 PM: “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” – Facebook’s mission statement

2:28 PM: To recap, he’s talked about new profiles and the highlighting of the news feed, the second item is Facebook Connect. The new profile launched Monday, he says. Facebook Connect will launch developer keys starting today – there will be a beta period.

2:26 PM: That’s it for launch partners. Mark is back on stage.

2:25 PM: A new site will have a “my friends” tab that shows reviews by friends in various cities.

2:23 PM: Mike Philips from Citysearch is taking the stage. He says they are launching a new site, where sharing information is a big piece. They are integrating with Facebook Connect. When a user looks for a hotel, restaurant, etc., Citysearch already has lots of reviews and data, but not a way to link up reviews from friends.

2:22 PM: When you login to comment, users can sign in via Movable Type or Facebook. If you sign in with Facebook, it will display changes – light blue boxes outline your friend’s comments.

2:20 PM: David Recordon from Six Apart just took the stage. They are releasing a plugin for Movable Type that allows people to comment using their Facebook profiles. Users can decide to profiles or keep them private.

2:17 PM: Digg is now allowing people to sign into Digg via Facebook or OpenID. There is no requirement to sign up for a Digg account.

2:15 PM: Launch partners are now coming on stage. First up is Digg by Joe Stump.

2:13 PM: Facebook Connect can show you which of your Facebook friends are also on the outside service, so you can link up with them there too. They are also allowing people to leave comments and requests on third party sites.

2:12 PM: Facebook Connect will let applications share data with Facebook. Users can bring Facebook friends with them to outside sites.

2:11 PM: Mark is now talking about Facebook Connect.

2:10 PM: He says he wants Facebook to be the platform and tools provider, but let apps do anything social they want.

2:08 PM: Mark says we are going to see the decentralization of social networking into apps on the web. Things will decentralize further, apps can run anywhere on the web, not just on social network platforms. They will all work together, just be decentralized.

2:05 PM: People (including us) are writing wall posts for Mark since he has his profile live on stage, but it looks like he’s actually using a fake profile, it shows just 8 friends.

2:03 PM: Mark is now showing a live demo of the new home page.

2:02 PM: Mark says they haven’t completely gotten rid of app boxes, they’re added a tab for them. Some apps really need them. Users can also add tabs for individual apps.

1:59 PM: He says the apps that leverage the news feed the best will be the ones that succeed.

1:58 PM: “The most important part of the profile is the wall and the news feed, which have now been merged. They also give developers an incentive to build apps that let users share a lot of information. This is a lot better than an application box, which people don’t interact with as much.”

1:56 PM: Mark is now talking about the new profile pages and how it fits in with their current goals.

1:54 PM: Mark says that over the last year Facebook hasn’t done enough to reward applications that provide a lot of long term value, and they haven’t punished the ones abusing the system.

1:53 PM: Mark is talking about lessons Facebook has learned. He says that they released the platform as quickly as possible, it wasn’t fully baked yet, and they didn’t anticipate the huge adoption.

1:52 PM: Mark says the most powerful tool on Facebook today is the News Feed. Traffic went up by 50% when they first launched news feed in late 2006.

1:51 PM: Mark is now talking about the social graph, a concept he introduced at the first f8 conference.

1:49 PM: LivingSocial just announced they received $5M in Funding, Flixster received $6M from Allen and Company, and Zynga got $29M from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Zuckerberg says, “There has been more than $200 million invested in the ecosystem.”

1:47 PM: David Glazer (Director of Engineering, Friend Connect) is here in the audience (which is about 1500 people), it looks like he will announce something. Perhaps they are announcing some kind of agreement.

1:45 PM: “We’re opening up the translation tool to allow apps to be translated as well…We now have more than 400k developers building on top of the platform. The developer community is spread around the world. More than half are outside of the US.

1:43 PM: Mark is now talking about opening up Facebook for translations made by users. They started with Spanish and French, and now the site is available in over 60 languages.

1:41 PM: Mark is looking back over the last year and says it’s been pretty crazy. Over 24 million people were using Facebook a year ago – today they are at 90 million people.

1:38 PM: Mark says its time to take the Facebook platform to the next level. On a recent vacation he realized (1) they want to build a product that really lets you connect with people, and (2) they want to extend the concept of presence, have more open connections and share more. They want to make the world a more open place

“The most important information is only available if people share it, and have the power and the tools to do so”

1:35 PM: Mark takes the stage and welcomes the crowd.

1:30 PM: Still waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to take the stage.

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As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing.

The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.

Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.

Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content.

Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently.

For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months.

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Six Apart has introduced an iPhone version of their BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to their blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Facebook. The current version of BlogIt is a traditional iPhone web-based app, though we can expect a native version on the way (Six Apart announced a native version of TypePad at Apple’s WWDC conference earlier this week). You can reach the app by pointing your iPhone’s browser to http://blogit.typepad.com/.

The company originally released BlogIt as a Facebook app in April. Both versions currently support posting to Movable Type, TypePad, Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress, along with the social networks mentioned above.

The app works well enough, but the release so soon before the release of Apple’s App Store is curious – it will be outdated in a month.

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TypePad AntiSpam is clearly aimed at Akismet, a similar spam fighting tool offered by arch-rival Automattic. Like Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs. But TypePad’s product is free – Akismet charges $5/month for commercial blogs making more than $500/month in revenue, and has performance limitations on the free version.

TypePad AntiSpam is also open source, and anyone can download the source code and create their own spam tool based on it. Akismet isn’t open source, although they have an API that allows developers to, among other things, develop additional integration tools for blogging platforms.

We are long time users of Akismet on the TechCrunch blogs, and I’ve included it in my last two yearly lists of products I can’t live without (2007, 2008) along with Wordpress, Automattic’s blogging software. Akismet blocks over 15,000 spam comments per day on TechCrunch.

But last week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

The product classifies comments as “ham” (good), “spam” (bad) or unknown (moderation). So far I’ve seen no good comments hit the spam folder (false positives), something that happens regularly with Akismet. Only a handful of spam comments made it to the site (false negatives). It seems like the rate of false negatives is lower than Akismet, but the team reviews the site for these regularly and so it’s impossible to compare them statistically, I’m just making a guestimate.

Twice now a large group of spam comments hit the moderation queue, but Six Apart says it was their system thinking we were under a denial of service attack from the sheer flow of spam attempts and triggering everything to moderation. They’ve now adjusted for that, and we haven’t seen it again.

TypePad AntiSpam is available now via plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Akismet has a much longer list of supported platforms – Six Apart says they will add more over time and, like Akismet, will rely on the developer community to pitch in as well.

If you are a blogger and don’t use a service to manage spam, you’ll want to use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. I recommend either. For now, we’ll stick with TypePad, and continue to report on how its doing.

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Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web.

Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story.

At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog?

Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere.

Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs.

Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears.

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Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that will allow bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones.

The plugin brings Movable Type to two distinct (and important) markets: Geo-enabled websites and location-based phone services. These features could be a boon to bloggers, especially those that write about real-world locales, such as restaurants or landmarks. They may also help writers reach a much larger audience through mobile phones.

The news comes soon after LightPole’s implementation of Yahoo’s geo-information platform FireEagle last month.

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Advertising Network – Six Apart Media

The company is now competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, the upcoming Technorati ad network and a number of others to get bloggers to join their network.

Six Apart has long sold advertising for itself on its network of free blogs on LiveJournal (before it was sold) and Vox. CEO Chris Alden says they have significant experience in grouping like-blogs and selling to large advertisers. The only difference now is that they will partner with the blog publisher and share revenue. They are partnering with Adify to provide back end admin infrastructure for publishers (accounts, payouts, etc.).

Six Apart says they’ve been able to group blogs and sell advertising to big brands (HP, MSN, Universal, among others), something that is hard to do without big name publishers. They think they can create a high value ad network for the masses. Currently, sites like FM and Glam provide high value advertisers but only to top sites. If Six Apart can deliver those kinds of advertisers, and the rates they pay, to millions of small blogs, they may have a hit on their hands.

There is no requirement that the blogs be using a Six Apart blogging platform. If you can add advertisements to your blog, you can join the network. Six Apart Media is led by David Tokheim.

Blog Services – Six Apart Services

Six Apart will also begin selling services to blogs for a fee. The core services will be offered by the Apperceptive team in New York, and include site design, back end development, search engine optimization and other services. These services are aimed at larger publishers that can pay, and will also be provided free or at a discount to members of the advertising network. The site isn’t neglecting their smaller customers though, and is also launching consulting services that are designed to help all bloggers maximize their marketing impact.

Six Apart Services is led by Marissa Levinson and David Jacobs.

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Who did they acquire? Put your best guess in the comments. First comment that is correct gets a 2 GB iPod shuffle with “I Love TechCrunch” engraved on the back.

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You can try it out here on TypePad’s new Design Assistant, which recently made its debut on Six Apart’s Movable Type. Pick a theme like “Camo Khaki.” Choose a Layout. Add your own custom CSS code if you don’t like the options TypePad gives you. And see how it will look on your blog. This beats the back-and-forth of having to pick out a theme and layout, apply it to your blog, see how it looks, and then go back to tweak.

Bringing Web design to the masses is something TypePad does particularly well. Wordpress has its own pretty templates too, of course. But blogs on Blogger seem to have the least variation. Which blogging service does the best job of making Web design both drop-dead simple and drop-dead gorgeous?

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Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel.

TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot.

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Now, Movable Type can benefit from improvements to its code contributed by its most ardent users. The competition should be good for bloggers everywhere who choose to host their own blogs (as opposed to those who use hosted services such as Six Apart’s Typepad or Automattic’s hosted version of Wordpress or Google’s Blogger). Six Apart’s Anil Dash, who notes the company’s commitment to openness in general, gives the low-down on how Movable Type took the open-source route. Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is based on Movable Type 4.0. Dash notes:

—MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
—All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
—MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
—We’ll be adding additional paid benefits for people who’ve paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
—You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org.
—Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
—We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects.

You can find more details here.

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Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

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The Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature enables social networks to embed a select number of widgets from third party developers and provide access to the over 10,000 widgets from the Widgetbox main gallery, giving their users the ability to easily find and use widgets to customize their profiles, blogs and web pages.

Partners can brand their own Widgetbox Remote Gallery and have control over the widget selection in the Widgetbox Remote Gallery. Galleries can be as large or small as desired and widget selection can be rotated as needed.

Launch partners include Freewebs, imbee.com, Xanga and Six Apart’s TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.

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