Blogging startup Six Apart launched BlogIt tonight, a Facebook blogging tool application that lets users quickly post to their blogs and then send notifications of the post to various social networks.
Use the tool to write a very basic blog post (no rich text or image uploading available yet), and then publish it to a supported platform - Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, Wordpress (org/com), Moveable Type or Tumblr. By clicking one or more boxes, the title of a post and a link to it will be sent to Facebook, Twitter and/or Pownce as a status update.
The idea is to allow Facebook users to very quickly share something they like on their blog, without leaving Facebook. The application can be added here. Here’s a screen shot of the user interface, and a screencast of the product is immediately after the image:
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has escalated the war of words against competitor SixApart with a new post that further attacks SixApart following a Twitter exchange Tuesday.
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress….
Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support….
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!…
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page…
For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.
Certainly SixApart’s history in relation to open source and caring about their community isn’t great (and I won’t be one to defend it). However Mullenweg’s comments are interesting given that Automattic’s biggest money earner Akismet is not open source (the service, not the plugin) and benefits from the the failure of WordPress to combat comment spam natively. Couple that with Automattic controlling WordPress as it was its own; some may suggest this a clear conflict of interest that disqualifies Mullenweg from taking the high moral ground. People in glass houses.
Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took aim at Wordpress users in a blog post today. Instead of upgrading to the new version of Wordpress, he says, consider moving over to their platform.
Now, it’s generally fair game to target your competitors, and Dash’s blog post was so tame that I can’t even find a good quote to pull into this post. But that didn’t stop Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg from going for blood. In a Twitter message, Matt says “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.” Anil fires back almost immediately with “@photomatt desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”
Last week the two companies dueled in the comments to a post we wrote - See David Recordon (SixApart) and Lloyd Budd (Automattic) comments starting here.
Who’s right? No idea. Dash notes that upgrading Wordpress is not exactly easy. Wordpress CEO Toni Schneider emailed me to say that some bloggers are actually moving from Moveable Type to Wordpress.
What’s clear is that neither platform is perfect, and requires far too much work for the bloggers. They both need to watch out for upcoming next generation platforms, which may eat both their lunches.
SixApart have launched a plugin for MovableType that offers a similar activity stream service to Facebook and Plaxo, but you get to host it.
The Action Streams plugin, like Facebook and Plaxo, pulls your data from other services and lists it on the page, for example blog posts, Flickr photos, Tweets and more. The plugin does rely on having MovableType installed, but is self hosted, meaning that you control the list, including privacy settings and data ownership.
The plugin can also be used to aggregate activity from a group as well as an individual, providing a portal or front page to groups of all sizes.
This is a good move from SixApart at a time where open standards and open access are quickly building momentum from being niche desires to mainstream wants. SixApart open sourced MovableType in December and it still has a long way to go to recapture its once dominant position as the blogging platform provider of choice, but plugins like this will certainly help them along the way.
Predicting what Google may do in 2008 is about as accurate as predicting the future using a Magic 8 ball; you can make educated guesses but it’s nothing more than that. There are two certainties however; Google will acquire many companies and they will also launch a range of new products and upgrades to existing products. Here’s a few companies that Google may look at in 2008.
Amazon
The idea of a merged Google + Amazon into a new company Googlezon is an old idea. However Amazon keeps moving into spaces that Google would naturally be a candidate to be in.
Last week Amazon added SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2). They are appealing products, and S3 in particular has built a strong client base that as changed the dynamics of online storage. This is a space that Google would logically want to be in. Google is already offering paid online corporate service through Google Apps and they have the infrastructure to offer similar services to Amazon.
Of course the ecommerce side of Amazon is the cream on top. Google has been desperately trying to break into ecommerce with Google Checkout. Google recommending Amazon products via search would be a huge winner.
Rating: Emulate
Amazon’s $37 billion market cap puts it out of range for a Google cash acquisition, although a combination cash/ script offer is not beyond the realms of possibility. Google needs new revenue streams to keep up their continuing high growth rates in 2008, enterprise level hosting and service provision would seem a no brainer for Google, presuming they can get the tech/ implementation right.
SixApart
SixApart has undergone a major refocus this year into what is now primarily a enterprise provider of blogging tools. The mostly free LiveJournal, a competitor to Blogger has been sold, and Movable Type has been open sourced, in part taking away the baggage of running (what was previously) a mostly free to use blogging platform. TypePad offers a serious blogging platform that companies are willing to pay for, something Google doesn’t currently have. Given Google’s push into paid enterprise platform provision TypePad would slot in nicely as an additional feature offered by Google. The stray in the SixApart package is Vox; it doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Google but it can easily be offloaded. A service such as TypeKey would fit nicely into Google’s Profile/ one login everywhere push.
Rating: possible buy
The alternative is Automattic, however WordPress.com competes primarily with Blogger, Akismet could be easily emulated and there’s not a lot of enterprise focused product on offer. There’s every chance that buyers will be circling SixApart in 2008, particularly as the original investors start looking for a buyout as the company hits 4+ years since its initial funding. Google seems like a natural fit, and they would easily be able to afford the maybe mid $xxx million figure.
Ning
The white label social network provider Ning is leading in its space, and of all the companies in this post, Ning is the most perfect fit for Google. As we saw with the announcement of Google Knol, Google is all about facilitating the creative desires of users, as does Ning. Google already offers its own free web hosting with Pages and blogs with Blogger, social networking sites fills the list out nicely. Ning would also mean that Google wouldn’t acquire a company that seriously competes with most of its partners in Open Social; instead of being a major social network owner, Google would simply become the biggest provider of social networks.
Rating: buy
Someone will buy Ning in 2008, Google would be the perfect buyer.
Reuters
Google faces another battle this year with rights holders over news, a battle they could in part lose. Even now media outlets worldwide are trying to find ways of blocking Google from indexing their content. Reuters is one of the worlds top two providers of syndicated news and is profitable. Google wants what Reuters has.
Rating: very long shot buy
AP is owned by the newspapers and will never sell, Reuters is listed making it a possible acquisition target. Google is moving away from simply being the company that indexes the world to being the company that also offers content to the world as well. A Google controlled Reuters would radically change the face of news gathering world wide. Not only would Google have first rights to most of the news worldwide, it could also leverage that control in forming partnerships with media outlets, partnerships that challenge AP and the established order. The possibilities for Google would be great: discounted Reuters news in return for running Google ads or for being indexed by Google, Google offering to host news sites at no cost as part of a content deal, allowing Google to know who was reading what and when. Reuters video and similar visual products would feed into YouTube and Google images. Very much a long shot but an appealing one. Maybe a small stake might be more likely for Google? Either way, Google wants news content from somewhere and I’d bet they’d be willing to pay for it if the deal was right.
If you have any acquisition targets for Google you’d like to share, leave a comment.
Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.
“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaining brands going forward” he added.
Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.
SixApart has launched a new version of the their Movable Type (MT) blogging platform, Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS) that takes blogging into the realms of forum hosting, with some nice 2.0 touches.
Other sites have reported that the new version is something akin to a Ning competitor, but this isn’t the case. I asked Six Apart’s VP Anil Dash exactly what we are looking at
MTCS is about rescuing the huge parts of the web that are still suffering under circa-1997 technologies. I call it the “Dark Web” — all these conversations that are taking place on bulletin boards, forums, and message boards, but they don’t have any of the usability or identity benefits of modern web technologies. And that’s leaving aside niceties like good URLs (for Google indexing) and tagging and rich media support. I mean, you just don’t see a forum where you can easily upload video or audio assets, for example.
MTCS generates a member profile for every user in a system, providing a profile page that shows commenting, interactions etc, but Dash says that isn’t the exciting part:
If I look at your profile, and the only conversations you’ve inspired are flame wars, it’s easy to know you’re not a valuable contributor. But to the contrary, if every comment or post you write gets marked as a favorite, then I can start to think about promoting you (using MT4’s built-in permissions system) to be an author or administrator, either on the forums or on other blogs in the system. Maybe you can even make static content pages. (Just imagine, instead of having to “pin a post” at the top of a forum to define policy, you can just *make a policy page*. So obvious, but such an improvement.)
The cross action integration is where SixApart feels that MTCS excels:
Upload a user picture for yourself, and it’s stored (and tagged) in MT4’s built-in asset management system. Vote for something as a favorite, and it shows up on the MT4 dashboard as favorite content, so other authors know it’s what the community is looking for. And best of all, administration and community participation features are separate, as they’ve always been in blogging tools — that fixes the problem forums have always had of trying to shove administration and management tools into the user-facing part of the site.
MTCS supports third party widgets (SixApart is a member of OpenSocial) and OpenID comes as standard.
Dash emphasized that MTCS is a “serious commercial product.”
It’ll likely cost a few thousand dollars to start, and the target audience is serious, large-scale communities like media companies, major brands, educational institutions, and intranet/enterprise deployments. I suspect that smaller independent sites will mostly grab a small number of free plugins that reproduce some of this functionality on a smaller scale and use that with the free version of MT if they are price-sensitive.
A demo forum running MTCS can be found here. A number of other sites, including Gothamist, BoingBoing and SeriousEats are already using some of the functionality including commenter profiles and recommendation tools.
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.
MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.
Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both (Update: see below).
Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.
Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they’ve moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes:
On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “we’ve been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this” (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago).
The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners.
We’re seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I’ll add screen shots below.
Here’s the big question - Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to “everyone.” This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition.
Chris Alden just took over as Chairman and CEO of blogging infrastructure startup Six Apart. Barak Berkowitz, CEO since 2004, steps down. Berkowitz will remain with the company as an advisor.
Alden joined Six Apart a year ago as part of the acquisition of Rojo, a company he founded.
Six Apart was founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott. Mena was the original CEO.
SixApart have announced an iPhone interface for their popular hosted blogging solution TypePad.
The new interface is automatically presented when an iPhone or iPod Touch is detected and allows users to create and edit posts, manage comments, configure mobile settings for posting photos directly from an iPhone, and view a published blog, all from an iPhone friendly layout.
Proving what good corporate leadership can provide for (soon to be) open sourced tools, the interface has been ported to the MovableType platform and is available for download as a completely open source plugin.
Movable Type’s Byrne Reese claims that the release of the MT plugin gives bloggers another reason to buy an iPhone, but in the cut throat blogging CMS business it may well give users a greater incentive to switch back to MovableType.
Blogging startup Six Apart launched BlogIt tonight, a Facebook blogging tool application that lets users quickly post to their blogs and then send notifications of the post to various social networks.
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.
SixApart have 
