Six Apart Media, TypePad Micro, and AVATAR
It’s only been a year and a half since our launch of Six Apart Media and I’m happy to report we’ve made a lot of progress since then. Six Apart Media has the dual mission to help bloggers on all platforms earn more advertising revenue and to provide brand marketers access to a growing audience of bloggers and blog readers. Today Six Apart Media reaches over 193 million people around the world and 67 million US every month (according to comScore) -- that’s bigger than most social networks, blog services, and social media ad networks.
Announcing the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion
The TypePad Platform
In 2003, Six Apart launched TypePad, which quickly became and remains the leading premium hosted blogging service. According to comScore, Six Apart is the leader in the blog category in the US and reaches over 183M unique visitors per month around the world - that’s bigger than MySpace - and TypePad is the cornerstone of Six Apart’s hosted services.
In the last year we’ve rebuilt TypePad from the ground up and introduced social networking features such as profiles, following, microblogging, and status updates to our bloggers. We've invested in making TypePad the most secure, stable, scalable and social blogging platform, but until now the only way to use it was through TypePad.com. Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of the TypePad Platform, where any developer, blogger, publisher, or corporation can use the TypePad “cloud” through our open APIs.
Cloud services didn’t exist in 2001 the way they do today, but now services from Amazon and others make building and launching new web sites much easier and less expensive by providing infrastructure level “cloud” services. Users of Flickr, Facebook and Twitter have transformed the internet by sharing their media and building relationships online, in part because of the flexibility of experiences that those platforms' API have enabled.
We hope to take cloud computing a step further with the TypePad Platform with this “smart cloud” service - combining the flexibility of infrastructure-focused services with the building blocks of our social application platform. Our platform enables developers to use structured object, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.
That all may be a bit too much jargon, I realize, so the bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs. We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
For larger publishers and Internet businesses, we see the TypePad Platform as new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites - offering an alternative to completely local software solutions or completely hosted SaaS solutions. With the TypePad Platform, publishers can use the presentation layer and templates of their choice - be it via MT, PHP, Django, Java, etc. - while not having to install and support an expensive back end.
For personal bloggers and TypePad users, opening up our APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help the bloggers and their readers, paving the way for more applications that enhance TypePad functionality. For our larger TypePad customers it opens up a large set of possibilities about how they can integrate their TypePad blogs into their existing web sites. For our Movable Type and Six Apart Services clients, this opens up many more ways that TypePad can be used in conjunction with, rather than an alternative to, Movable Type or other installed blogging platforms.
The TypePad Developer Program
To help folks get started using the TypePad Platform, we’ve launched the TypePad Developer Program to provide developers with a free beta version, or Developer Preview, of the TypePad API, available today. Commercial versions of the TypePad Platform will come later, but the TypePad API for developers is free. Developers will find documentation, a forum, mailing list and group where they can get their questions answered quickly at developer.typepad.com.TypePad Motion
To show what the TypePad Platform can do, today we are announcing and open sourcing TypePad Motion as the inaugural open source application built by Six Apart for the TypePad platform. Typepad Motion is a microblogging app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community, It’s written in Python using the Django framework, making it extremely easy to build and customize. It’s a great example of how developers can use TypePad for the heavy lifting without sacrificing the flexibility and control of an entirely separate presentation layer, like Django, to maintain templates and build pages.A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities. Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star.
For more information about TypePad Motion, please visit typepad.com/go/motion.
This opens up a new chapter for TypePad and Six Apart, and it’s just a start. The TypePad Platform is new and now primarily for developers who wish to preview and test the service. We’d love your feedback. It is Six Apart’s continuing mission to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market while increasing the capability and scalability in building social applications. We’re hoping to make web publishing even more accessible and social and we hope you will join us.
National Geographic Partners with Six Apart
In order to create interest and engagement around this controversial subject, Six Apart Media spent this week asking relevant questions on Vox, LiveJournal and Blogs.com. Bloggers have been weighing in on everything from which food they'd miss most if they were sent to prison to whether or not the prisoners in the War on Terror should be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
It's not too late for you to weigh in on these topics. Join the conversation at Blogs.com.
And be sure to tune in to "Inside Guantanamo" on the National Geographic Channel this Sunday at 9 p.m. to learn more about what life on the inside is really like.
Skittles: The biggest social network is the web itself
- The biggest online social network is the internet itself. Skittles obviously gets this — instead of targeting one social network for their efforts, they've tried to connect to a broad set of networks.
- Reveal the community you already have. Again, Skittles understands that they shouldn't try to make their own community from scratch. Instead of competing with the big social networks, they tried to connect to their community wherever those people are already active.
- Your social network belongs under your control. This is the one where Skittles.com comes up short. Letting your community share in ownership or control of your brand does not require completely abdicating control over your company homepage.
- Instead of merely saying "our brand has to have a Facebook page!" or "Why isn't our company on Twitter?" smart marketers are realizing the only way to be successful online is to combine all of the different networks together.
- Empowering your customers and community to feel like they own your brand does not mean that you have to completely give up control over what people see when they come to your website.
- A smart way to look at what people are saying about your brand online is as a starting point for a conversation that can continue on your own site, not as the end of the story.
Six Apart Media: Solutions for Bloggers and Advertisers
Last April, we launched Six Apart Media, our innovative advertising program that helps make bloggers and advertisers successful.
Today’s bloggers are savvy, outspoken and influential, inspiring a record number of people to join conversations throughout the social web. We’re happy to report that to date, Six Apart Media reaches over 2.4 million of these influential bloggers with more than 85.5 million engaged readers. Since our launch, we’ve had some incredibly talented bloggers join our advertising program, including:
Most recently, we’ve been hard at work on a campaign for Nature Made, who asked us to help inspire people to share their stories of greatness. Since we know how much bloggers love sharing and because we believe that each of us has a personal story of greatness to tell, this was a campaign we couldn’t wait to kick off.
You can share your story of greatness by answering today’s QotD on Vox, LiveJournal and within your TypePad profile. If you don’t have an account with any of those services, don’t worry, anyone can answer the Question of the Day on Blogs.com! Once you’ve answered, be sure to submit your story on the Nature Made website. You could win $1,000 and appear in the Nature Made “Fuel Your Greatness” documentary.
With so many great bloggers and advertisers on board, we are very excited for what the future holds. Are you ready to join the conversation? Whether you're a blogger who wants to generate income from your blog, or an advertiser looking for creative ways to reach your target audience, we have a solution for you.
Visit Six Apart Advertising to learn more.
Six Apart Announces Support for Parallel’s APS Format, Providing Wider Availability of Movable Type through Global Hosting Providers
San Francisco, CA - February 4, 2009 - Six Apart, the world's leading blogging software and services company, today announced the availability of Movable Type through hosting providers who support the Parallels’ Application Packaging Standard (APS) format. Now any size organization can purchase Movable Type via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, making it easier than ever to get a social website up and running on Movable Type. Datagram, the Internet Network Services Company, is the first hosting provider to sign a formal agreement to use the APS format of Movable Type.
Six Apart made the announcement at the 2009 Parallels Summit, the premier hosting conference currently taking place in Las Vegas, where it is an exhibitor and two of its executives are speaking. Ed Anuff, EVP and GM of Movable Type and Six Apart Services, and Michael Sippey, VP of Product Strategy, are participating on panels during the three-day conference.
“We are committed to making it easier than ever to build a rich, interactive website on the Movable Type platform, and this is one more step in that direction. By supporting the APS format, we can provide end users and hosting providers with the best social media platform available,” said Ed Anuff. “Now partners like Datagram can generate additional revenue by bundling Movable Type with other services while end users can use Movable Type on an on-demand basis with confidence that they will have the most up-to-date version of Movable Type in a high quality environment.”
The APS format, which was designed by Parallels, enables hosting providers to efficiently provision and install Movable Type on their existing infrastructure using a standard “socket” for APS applications. As an APS-compliant application, Movable Type is compatible with Parallels’ Plesk control panel and Virtuozzo containers.
In an increasingly competitive market, hosting providers can differentiate their service offerings with Movable Type to retain existing customers, attract new clients, and generate additional revenue per user. Movable Type’s blogging and content management capabilities, built-in social and community features, powerful administration and analytics tools, and proven security track record make Movable Type a premium addition to any hosting service package.
“Movable Type will be a valuable addition to our wide range of dedicated hosting options,” said Alex Reppen, CEO of Datagram. “We understand the vital role blogs play on the web and with Movable Type available in APS format and our experience in hosting, a partnership to provide a hosted Movable Type solution made a lot of sense.”
Hosting providers interested in learning more about Movable Type partnership opportunities can contact Six Apart by visiting movabletype.com/services/partners/signup.
About Datagram
Datagram is the Internet Solutions Company that enables clients to efficiently leverage the Internet to achieve their objectives by providing highly reliable network and datacenter-based services, such as Dedicated Hosting, Internet Access, Colocation and Disaster Recovery. With over fifteen years experience in designing networks and server environments, Datagram operates state-of-the-art network and datacenter facilities in the New York metropolitan area, with additional points of service in Connecticut and California. Datagram is committed to optimal customer support and first-in-class technology so customers can focus on growing their business while Datagram takes care of the rest. Datagram: Internet Solutions Made Simple. To simplify your company’s Internet solutions, please visit www.datagram.com.
About Movable Type
Movable Type is Six Apart's flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers many of the websites and blogs of the world's largest media companies and Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers. Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social publishing platform upon which to build highly interactive websites, blogs and social networks. For more information please visit www.movabletype.com.
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 around the world every day. The company provides the Movable Type social publishing platform, the TypePad premier hosted blogging service, Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families, advertising solutions for leading brands and influential bloggers, and a wide range of services dedicated to help bloggers thrive in today’s social media landscape. Founded in 2001, Six Apart is a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, and offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York City. For more information, visit the Six Apart corporate web site at www.sixapart.com.
Media Contact
Six Apart
Jane Anderson
650-440-0540
TypePad Connects to Google, AOL, Yahoo! and more
If you've already tried out our recently launched commenting service via TypePad Connect, you know that we built in very basic support for OpenID sign in from the start. We did this because we know that just as the future of traditional media wasn't a small group of large publishers controlling all of the news, the future of the social web isn't a small group of large social networks controlling everyone's identity. Today we've made it even easier for anyone to sign in, leave a comment, and have a TypePad Profile (see mine) without having to know their OpenID URL or even what OpenID is.
The TypePad Connect team has now explicitly added support to sign in using your Vox, Google, Yahoo!, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, or AOL account in addition to your TypePad username and password. This small change means that any blog using TypePad Connect powered comments now has over a half a billion people who can sign in - thus no longer being anonymous - just by clicking a button in the case of Google and Yahoo! or entering their username on AOL, Vox, and the others.
And of course this same idea - bringing your existing identity with you - is built into Motion as well. Our latest application for Movable Type Pro shows off how, just like with TypePad Connect, there are now half a billion people who are able to log into your site, without even having to sign up for a new account.
The Laws of Motion
If you want to check out Motion here are a few easy ways to get started:
- Read all about Motion and find out what it's good for and what features it includes.
- Sign up for a hosted demo of the platform, and we'll walk you through Motion and the thinking that's inspired it.
- Test out a live Motion site where dozens of community members have already registered and tried out the Motion experience for themselves.
(Note: Content on the demonstration site can be reset or deleted at any time, and we regularly take the site offline as new updates to the Motion application are installed.)
The Web is in Motion
Just as important to us as the technologies we've developed are the ideas behind Motion. These philosophical underpinnings are explained in our blog post introducing Motion. We believe that the right strategy for connecting your blog or site to the world of social networking is not to select one particular social network to hold all the cards, but to connect to all of the powerful and vibrant social networks across the web.
In our internal conversations we've referred to these principles (with tongue firmly in cheek) as The Laws of Motion, and given our company name, there are naturally six of them. Here's what Motion is meant to demonstrate:
- The biggest online social network is the internet itself.
- Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media.
- Reveal the community you already have.
- Your social network belongs under your control.
- Your community should start with half a billion members.
- The web is in Motion.
Facebook Connect? Google Friend Connect? Why Choose‽
The most visionary social networking sites on the web are naturally the first ones to embrace this idea of interconnectedness. For example, the newly-announced Facebook Connect plugin directory features the brand-new, open source Facebook Connect plugin for Movable Type which we first previewed here on this blog earlier this year.This plugin is a free download that works with any Movable Type 4.2 installation, but what's better is that this functionality is built right in to Motion, along with support for authentication through Google, Yahoo, AOL/AIM, and any other popular OpenID provider. There's never been an application like this, which supports the half a billion individual accounts across these services, allowing almost anyone on the web to comment on or favorite your content without having to register to create an account.
And while the technology we're talking about is pretty cool, at this time of year, we know everyone's mind is on the coming new year and what it will hold. Though this geeky stuff can pale in significance to the personal and global issues that rightly come first, at Six Apart we do care deeply about the web and the conversations it makes possible. So as we gear up for 2009, we can't help but see it as a hopeful sign that an ambitious and fairly idealistic vision for the future of the social web has gotten such a positive early response.
We can't wait to see how the open web evolves, continue working to help it evolve faster, and we're even more excited to see what our community does with these new abilities in the coming year.
Welcome Pownce team!
We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board.
For Pownce users, we are very sorry the site will be closing. We welcome you to join us on Vox - Leah and Mike are there! - and we hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future. For the Pownce Pro users, we would like to offer you a free TypePad account for a year. All Pownce users will receive an email with further instructions about exporting content out of Pownce and signing up for Vox or TypePad accounts.
We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.
TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!
Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:
- Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
- New commenting capabilities
- TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.
This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.
As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.
Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.
As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.
Open For Comment
We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.
And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.
We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.
TypePad Connects Everywhere
As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.
This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.
There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.
