Six Apart News & Events: December 2007

Our best wishes for a peaceful and happy holiday season from the team at Six Apart. Thank you for a wonderful 2007, and we look forward to a very exciting 2008 with you.

From all of us in the United States...

....and our Japan team.....

.... and our team in Europe.

See you in 2008!

A few weeks ago, Facebook launched their Beacon feature, which lets you update your Facebook network when you’ve performed actions on other sites. Since then, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate over how the feature works, what the implications of Beacon are, and how it should work.

Here’s the story from our standpoint: We announced Beacon support on both LiveJournal and TypePad as initial launch partners. But we worked really hard with the Facebook team on one really important detail — making sure our implementations are completely opt-in.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was kind of a no-brainer. We’ve learned over the past few years that you just can’t surprise people about where or when their actions will be shared on the web. If it helps, you can just think, “What if every site on the web implemented the feature this way?”

So, to reassure people who’ve asked, both TypePad and LiveJournal are strictly, truly opt-in for sharing your information using Facebook’s Beacon feature. We think it’s a cool feature that has a ton of potential, especially if you’ve got complete control over it.

Acquisition of LiveJournal, creation of new operating company and investment fund by SUP promise new innovation and expansion for pioneering online community

San Francisco, CA – December 3, 2007 - Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has established an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

This agreement builds on the established and successful relationship between Six Apart and SUP, which entered into a licensing agreement in October 2006 permitting SUP to manage LiveJournal in Russia. The Russian LiveJournal community is second only to the U.S. in number of accounts, and has been influential enough in that country to make “LiveJournal” synonymous with “blogging” in Russian.

“We have a tremendous respect for the LiveJournal community, and are pleased to see that LiveJournal, Inc. will continue to build on LiveJournal’s rich user experience. We have been impressed by the expertise and enthusiasm that SUP has brought to LiveJournal in Russia. They’ve introduced new features, nearly doubled the number of users, invested in key product enhancements, and have done justice to one of the most innovative online social networks in the world. Judging both by SUP’s track record and their eagerness to create a new user advisory board to oversee the community’s interests, this is clearly a good fit,” stated Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart.

“Having gotten to know LiveJournal in Russia over the past year we see enormous potential in developing the business worldwide; it has already showed its durability in America. We believe this is a great opportunity,” said Andrew Paulson, CEO of SUP.

Six Apart acquired LiveJournal in January 2005 from its founder, Brad Fitzpatrick. From its founding, LiveJournal popularized many of the fundamental innovations of social media, such as friends lists and powerful privacy controls. Under Six Apart, the number of LiveJournal accounts nearly tripled from 5 million to over 14 million, and dozens of new features were introduced to the site, including

• a powerful email/IM/web notification system;
• LJTalk, a completely open-source Jabber-based instant messaging platform;
• user-to-user messaging and tremendous improvements in comment management and editing;
• a vastly expanded mobile feature set, including a dedicated mobile client; and
• dozens of new visual themes and a completely new, simplified site design and navigation system.

Six Apart will continue its active investment in and promotion of the signature open source platform technologies created by the LiveJournal team, such as Memcached, Mogile, Perlbal, and OpenID, all of which have been adopted by other leading web properties from Craigslist to Facebook to Wikipedia. LiveJournal, Inc. will also carry on LiveJournal’s strong open source tradition.

Six Apart will also continue to represent LiveJournal to advertisers and sponsors for at least the coming twelve months. Brand owners interested in advertising on LiveJournal or Six Apart’s Vox may visit here. http://www.sixapart.com/about/advertising

“While we’ll miss being LiveJournal’s home, this is a great milestone for LiveJournal and also lets us to focus on the core products invented at Six Apart: Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox,” said Alden. “We are investing heavily in the products and have substantial growth plans for 2008.”

For more information about the acquisition, please visit http://community.livejournal.com/LJ_2008/

About Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate across the world every day. Founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott, Six Apart is a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, CA, and offices in Europe and Japan. The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type Publishing Platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families. For more information visit the Six Apart corporate web site at http://www.sixapart.com/.

Six Apart Media Contact
Jane Anderson
Mobile: 650.440.0450
Office: 415.344.0056 x 107
jane@sixapart.com

SUP Media Contact
Tim Smith
Mobile: 415-350-3019
Office: 415-321-1880
lj@sparkpr.com