Anil Dash, chief evangelist for blogging software platform Six Apart, announced today that blogging platform has launched a a plugin that provides WordPress users with access to a suite of Six Apart’s add-on features for blogs. Dash made the announcement at WordPress blogger convention WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. While some of Six Apart’s functionality have been available to WordPress users, this is the first time the site is offering these services as a suite to a rival blogging platform. These features include TypePad AntiSpam, a free open source anti-spam service; TypePad Connect, a commenting profile service; integration with Six Apart Media, the site’s advertising network; and inclusion with blog directory Blogs.com.

Dash says that this move represents “baby steps” in Six Apart’s tentative first efforts to provide a suite of features and functionality to WordPress users. This a big deal, considering the long standing rivalry between the two blogging platforms. Last year, the two companies had a heated duel via company blog posts, Twitter and in TechCrunch comments.

Perhaps this integration between the Six Apart and WordPress will help settle the peace between the competitors. And perhaps this is a strategic move on Six Apart’s side to integrate with WordPress, a widely popular platform in the blogging world. One thing is for certain— it’s a blessing for many WordPress bloggers, who will now be able to use the plugin to access some of the useful features of SixApart without having to switch platforms. WordPress offers its own free and paid features for bloggers including a stats system and the commenting and spam technology Akismet (which TechCrunch uses).

Here’s a video clip of Dash talking about WordPress plug-ins and blogging:

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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:

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Some highlights from the post:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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).

MySpace says their new platform efforts will be entirely focused on OpenSocial.

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.

Bebo has also joined OpenSocial.

Flixster/MySpace screen shots:

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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.

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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.

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The finalized version includes 50 new features, a component based architecture, a new plugin directory, and some new launch partners. It looks like a solid release that comes with a lot of the functionality Wordpress MU is aiming for. Notably, Boing Boing will be upgrading soon.

We covered the upgraded features in depth before. They included a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks. You can see a full list here.

However, the release also includes a shift to a component based architecture running on top of a single MT 4 code base. Components will be paid extensions of the platform meant to provide greater functionality out of the box. The first example component will be their enterprise version. Instead running as a separate installation, the enterprise version of the software will run on top of the basic MT 4 code base. It will feature the original enterprise feature set, including LDAP and Oracle support.

They have also released a new community component that beefs up the basic community features. The component adds a ratings system and deeper user profiles. The ratings system consists of post specific user ratings and a buzz feature that tracks the highest rated content. The new profile pages consist of a blog, their latest comments, and recommendations on your site. The infrastructure for these enhancements exist in the basic version, but buying the community component provides them out of the box and comes with support. They plan on releasing more components in the future.

Accompanying the release, Movable Type is launching a new plugin directory. They’ll also have some partners throwing their own plugins into the mix. Partners developing supporting applications and tools for MT4 include HP, Amazon, Sphere, Technorati, Snap, Feedblitz, NewsGator, SimplyHired, SocialText, Fliqz, Box.net, Mpire, Vizu, SodaHead, and Oodle.

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Moveable Type 4.0 is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3.0 in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting announcement: SixApart will open source Movable Type before the end of the third quarter.

I spoke to SixApart’s Vice President Anil Dash prior to the launch and he explained that SixApart sees the move to an open source Movable Type as going back to SixApart’s roots.

There’s a lot of history between MT users and SixApart. Although Movable Type was never an open source platform, prior to the release of MT 3.0 many treated MT as if it was open source. The decision to enforce licensing with the release of MT 3.0 caused widespread outrage in 2004 (including rather vocally from myself) and in many ways was a tipping point that delivered WordPress from relative obscurity to being the popular blogging CMS it is today.

Dash said that commercially SixApart had no choice other than to enforce licensing at the time. However SixApart in 2007 is a thriving company with a broad suite of popular products, including TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal, and today can afford to give back to the blogging community.

The new version of Movable Type is a radical departure from previous versions.

MT4 includes more than 50 new features including a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks.

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

Scalability is dramatically improved with built in support for database caching through Data::Object Driver and Memcached, incorporating technology that powers Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites including AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook.

The new licensing model once MT 4 is opened source will be similar to MySQL, the paid version will include technical and product support from SixApart.

I have a long history with SixApart that isn’t worth repeating here. As a vocal critic previously I can now say in all honesty that a leopard can change its spots. The new version of MovableType looks wildly appealing to me as a blogger and the decision to open source the platform may well deliver broad numbers of WordPress converts back to the platform that started it all. The open sourced version of MT 4.0 will also offer a strong alternative to the millions of WordPress users who never grew up in blogging using MovableType.

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,” meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joining Six Apart’s executive team.

This deal brings to a close the long saga of the Rojo story. The company was founded in June 2003, launched in October 2004 and had a stellar team of investors including TPG Ventures, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo consistently released excellent products and has a loyal core user base. Rojo had a promising start and its userbase continued to grow gradually. But the crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in. My hope is that the Rojo product continues to iterate, it’s one of my favorite websites.

Our previous coverage of Six Apart is here, and Rojo is here. We also had a very lively discussion with executives from a number of feed readers, including Chris Alden from Rojo, in a TalkCrunch podcast a couple of months ago.

Look for more partnerships like this from Feedburner over time. Details on the partnership are here.

Vox was initially introduced last fall at a DEMO conference (click here for details and a video archive of Mena Trott’s presentation).

Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags.

There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called “neighborhood” is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.

Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want – integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages.

Vox will be free and advertising supported.

More screenshots here.

As previously widely speculated, Six Apart, the makers of the TypePad blogging platform and MovableType blogging tool today announced that they have closed a Series C round of financing of $12 Million. The round was raised from Focus Ventures, Intel Capital and August Capital and brings total amount Six Apart has raised to $23 Million.

Six Apart seem to be doing well with a large subscriber base at TypePad and their recent announcement of TypePad business class and a new plan to bring more businesses into blogging easier. SixApart have a lot more growing to do and this latest round of funding should see them through the next phases of growth.

Also SixApart today announced that they have acquired SplashBlog for an undisclosed sum. SplashBlog is a blogging solution for mobile phones and PDA’s and we should shortly see this service integrated with Six Apart’s existing services.

SixApart, the creators of popular blogging platforms TypePad and MovableType will be releasing a set of new features and services for their products directly aimed at the growing business market for blog software. Currently there are a large number of corporations already publishing blogs using SixApart software and the latest releases are part of a broader strategy to better support and to grow this enterprise customer base.

The first software release to spin out of the new strategy will be Typepad Business Class, a new TypePad edition that will be suited for companies with high-traffic sites who wish to setup a blog or multiple blogs to communicate with their audience. TypePad Business Class will be launching today and will contain a number of technical enhancements over classic TypePad that are tailored for enterprise requirements. For starters there will be an improved permissions structure with up to 4 levels of administrator access which can be used to control access to all aspects of the blog (such as ability to post, comment management, design editing). They have also made it easy to setup additional blogs and to control all aspects of the corporations blog design so that it can be tailored to match their corporate identity. The storage allocation with the Business Class service will be 4GB while bandwidth allocation will be 40GB per month with the price coming in at $89.95 per month. Other plans with more storage and bandwidth allocation will also be available at higher prices.

SixApart will also accompany the technical improvements with service level agreements that will guarantee a certain level of uptime, an essential requirement if they wish to attract the big corporations onto their platform. The SLA being offered only guarantees 99% uptime (which is still 4 days a year of downtime, that isn’t guaranteed) but it is the first such guarantee from a blogging provider. SixApart will also be holding seminars to help companies start blogging, the first of these is the Blog Business Summit on March 16, 2006 in Los Angeles.

Also as part of the new business strategy MovableType will be getting a makeover with some enterprise features such as integration with LDAP directories and other authentication services, better anti-spam protection, Oracle database support (amongst others) and customizable email support. The business-grade MovableType doesn’t have a launch date or a price yet but it is currently in beta in Japan and should be out soon.

It seems that every day you hear about or see news of yet another company that has started a blog (or blogs) so capturing this interest and growth with targeted products is a very smart strategy from SixApart. At the moment these businesses who wish to blog are either setting it up themselves or engaging outside consultants, so now they have a company to go to which has a solid market share in the consumer space and a good reputation. I believe it is only a matter of time before Wordpress and others catch onto this market and release their own services targeted at businesses.