Blog platform company Six Apart is adding a free, miniaturized blogging service to its paid blog hosting service TypePad. The new TypePad Micro service is essentially a simplified template, called Chroma, for unpaid users on the TypePad service. It will likely be compared with Posterous and Tumblr.
The Chroma template is flexible and attractive, and most of the blogs I've seen using it look good. It's a great format for short posts and for sharing pictures and embedded videos.
But as a short-form blog authoring platform, TypePad Micro is still TypePad, a powerful and capable blogging system that may be overkill for people who just want a way to post quick items. The main Quick Compose interface is nice and light, but one level down, the options are overwhelming. In comparison, Tumblr's posting interface is light and clean all the way through. Posterous' Web interface is even leaner, and if that's still too much for you, you can start blogging on it via e-mail, without even setting up an account on the Web site. (To be fair, you can also post to TypePad Micro via e-mail.)
The new Chroma template is well-suited to short posts and images.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Still, what Six Apart is doing with TypePad Micro is probably good for Six Apart and it's definitely good for writing and writers. From the product perspective, CEO Chris Alden believes that there's a somewhat open space in the blogging world between full-on blogs like TypePad and micro-blogs like Twitter. He envisions TypePad Micro as a good starting point for people who want to say more than they can on Twitter and don't want to pay for it (thus putting TypePad Micro in competition with the free Wordpress.com). He also sees it as a supplementary blog template for paying TypePad customers who want a new outlet for quick posts.
There is a quick posting form for TypePad Micro, but the rest of the author's site is complex.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)And if you care about writing, as I do, you'll love the new micro formats like this one, since they encourage people to write shorter posts. Since you have to think more when you're writing for a small space, this is good.
The TypePad platform also integrates into the modern world of Twitter, Facebook, and the like: Every time you post, the platform can automatically send alerts out to dozens of other accounts. And stealing a feature from Twitter, Movable Type lets readers "follow" TypePad blogs.
TypePad Micro is live now.
The new TypePad comments are a lot more attractive than before.
Six Apart's paid, hosted blogging service, TypePad, is getting improved community features. The first thing most users will notice is a new blog commenting system. It has both a cleaner display of comments (with icons for the comments, WordPress-style), as well as a simpler comment entry interface. Users can also reply to particular comments and the system supports one level of threading.
The updated comments service hooks into TypePad's new profile system. Commenters with TypePad IDs get a place that collects all the comments they leave on all TypePad comment-enabled blogs, and users can add feeds from their accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, and about 45 other services. That makes the profile pages a lot more dynamic and interesting.
The TypePad comment system can be embedded on non-TypePad blogs. The service can automatically install on WordPress.org, Blogger, and Tumblr sites. HTML code is provided to put the comment system on other blogs.
This new comment ecosystem is certainly an improvement over the previous version. But bloggers have other very good commenting systems to choose from. I favor Disqus, for instance. Although I do like the new TypePad system, I don't see a reason to install it on my WordPress blog ProPRTips, (and actually, I couldn't if I wanted to--users of WordPress.com-hosted blogs can't get far enough under the hood to make the switch; bloggers using WordPress.org software hosted elsewhere can, however).
The new system is certainly an improvement, and more than that it's interesting to see Six Apart continue to spin core functionality out of its paid products and offer it to the world for free. Previously, of course, the company made Movable Type open source and free. The company clearly hopes that exposure to these products will make revenue-generating products more attractive. Whatever the motivation, these are serious and full-featured products, now available for nothing, and I'm cool with that.
The new TypePad profiles collect all your commenting activities on TypePad-enabled blogs.
This morning, Six Apart unveiled its newest iPhone creation, a very svelte-looking port of Blog It, which the company introduced back in April. The simple tool lets you write and cross-blog a post or status update to several services at once. The company is hoping people will use it as a home base to manage all their updates. It's also a somewhat early look at some of the features users will be getting in the upcoming native blogging application announced on Monday.
The tool started out as a Facebook app and has since pulled in about 10,000 users. According to Six Apart's Open Platforms technical lead, David Recordon, the top user request was to get the service onto other platforms, and the iPhone is just the first. Another was to get a WYSIWYG editor built in so people won't have to deal with inserting all sorts of HTML gobbledy goop while typing out a quick post on the road. That was added just a month later.
The app uses the same open standards architecture as the Facebook app, meaning you can log in quickly with your OpenID or from any of the blogging platforms. The only legwork that must be done is setting up all your accounts one by one. If you don't feel like numbing your fingers on the iPhone version, you can add these same accounts in the Facebook version of Blog It--the two share the same login information.
Next month, among the slew of third-party apps hitting the iPhone's App Store, blogging tool TypePad will be giving its users a new way to blog on the go. The native application was just announced at Apple's WWDC Monday morning, but I got a sneak peek at it last week. I think it's going to be a lifesaver for bloggers who want to monitor and administrate their blogs while away from a laptop or home PC.
The app will let you write and edit posts on your phone and save them for later, helping people avoid that potentially great write-up from getting lost because you're in a cellular dead spot or your browser crashes. Six Apart's Open Platforms Technical Lead David Recordon tells me the company is expecting users to treat it as more of a monitoring tool to keep an eye on comments, traffic, and posts from other contributing writers.
Video: TypePad app for iPhone
Last year, the company introduced two smaller-scale efforts that offered similar features--one for its hosted blogging solution Movable Type, and another for TypePad. Both ran in Safari, whereas the new app runs natively and gets access to Apple's new developer service that allows for application notifications that can be pushed over the air without wearing down the phone's battery with extra processes.
Similar apps for other blogging platforms including WordPress and Blogger should be expected in the coming weeks. I'm also expecting to see Six Apart add support for Movable Type later this year.
Six Apart is launching a free, semi-open-source filter for blog comment spam.
TypePad AntiSpam is the same antispam technology that's currently built into TypePad, but the company is making it available to all who want it, with no charge and no usage restrictions. The service is in semi-beta: "The code is not beta but the (open source framework around it) is," Six Apart CEO Chris Alden also said.
There will be TypePad AntiSpam plug-ins available for Six Apart's blog platforms, TypePad and Movable Type, as well as for Wordpress blogs.
The TypePad AntiSpam framework is open source. Anyone can muck around in the code that integrates the engine, repackage it, and so on. The heurestics and rules in the engine itself, however, run on Six Apart's servers and are not open. Opening them would give spammers everything they need to break through the system, Alden told me. The standard antispam engine for Wordpress, Akismet, is also closed.
However, Alden said, if someone has their own antispam engine, they could plug it into the open-source framework.
TypePad AntiSpam plugs into TypePad as well as Wordpress.
(Credit: Six Apart)Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch has been testing this antispam service, Alden said.
Six Apart announced last night that it has sold off its free blogging service LiveJournal to Russian Internet company Vox, the blog publishing platform TypePad, and the professional-level blog software product Movable Type. LiveJournal was brought into Six Apart through an acquisition in 2005.
LiveJournal will be run by a new company, LiveJournal Inc., out of San Francisco, but owned by SUP. LiveJournal's seven employees (transfers from Six Apart) are currently working in the Movable Type offices.
What can we expect from the remaining three products at Six Apart? Alden wants his company to focus on building "community and content management systems," not just publishing platforms. This transition is already evident in Movable Type, which has a new (and expensive) add-on called Movable Type Community Services (see story: Six Apart is fixing forums). Among other features, the product lets end users mark other people as friends and track what they're doing. Just like a social network.
The free blogging tool Vox also offers interesting community features, like the capability to define who's in your blog "neighborhood," to make keeping track of your Vox friends easier. It also has a good system for restricting who can see your personal posts.
That leaves TypePad, the paid blogging service that, while capable, isn't currently a shining star of ad-hoc community, the way a contemporary general-purpose social site like Ning is. Alden confirmed to me that in 2008 TypePad will get Movable Type Community Service features like user recommendations on items, voting, and group membership. Vox will get these tools as well. Alden also said that the Six Apart's goal is not just to give bloggers tools to manage communities that spring up around their sites, but to link these communities together.
Moving into community management is a good direction for Six Apart. Communities--not individual bloggers--are the power brokers on today's Web. It's readers, en masse, who move markets. Six Apart's goal to empower bloggers with tools that turn readers into active community participants could leverage this power shift.
I'd like to see Six Apart partner with Ning to extend this vision. I don't think this will happen, though. It looks more like Six Apart is trying to clean up its business to make the company an easier acquisition target.
Disclosure: I worked with Chris Alden at Red Herring, the magazine he co-founded, from 1998 to 2001.
Apple's iWeb, one part of the iLife consumer apps suite, has received an interesting update this morning. iWeb is Apple's consumer-level Web site creation tool, and it gives users a simple way to drag and drop various Web site elements as well as fill in the included templates. The latest version is getting integration with two of Google's services: AdSense and Google Maps. iWeb users can now sign up for AdSense right inside the application, and pick how they want it to show up on their site. From the looks of the screenshots, it's much easier than having to copy and paste code into HTML pages. The Google Maps feature is also pretty straightforward, letting you drop in a draggable map anywhere on the page.
The best new feature, however, is the addition of Web snippets. This lets you drop in any old chunk of embed code to add various widgets, from YouTube videos to some of the more advanced ones we typically cover here on Webware. This opens up your iWeb-made page to a bundle of third-party services you wouldn't otherwise get in the somewhat limited creation tool.
Of course you could always get most of these features and more on the Web with services such as TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger--but Apple's approach is good for people who like to work with pages visually in a WYSIWYG environment.
iWeb users can now drop in a Google map or AdSense ads onto their Web site without knowing or using any HTML.
(Credit: Apple.com)Inspiration for a blog can come from anywhere--at any time--so you'd best be prepared. Lighter than your Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and more immediate than jotting journal notes is TypePad Mobile (for Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile,) a blog-updating app offered by TypePad for its paid subscribers.
Blogging about mobile blogging from a mobile phone.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I evaluated TypePad Mobile on a gleaming HTC Vox S710 (watch Bonnie Cha's video review) running Windows Mobile 6. The smart phone's nice slider QWERTY keyboard and motion-sensitive vertical-to-horizontal display made for favorable testing conditions.... Read More
Today blogging-tools company Six Apart is upgrading its business-focused products, TypePad and Movable Type.
In the blog echo chamber, Automattic's WordPress gets a lot of the buzz, since it's open source, free, and led by the charismatic and young Matt Mullenweg (interview part 1 and part 2). WordPress' blogging software is well liked by its users, and there are a lot of people who know how to maintain WordPress installations. Automattic also runs WordPress.com, a hosted blogging service. TechCrunch and GigaOm run on WordPress.
Meanwhile, Six Apart sells Movable Type, a competing product to WordPress. It's a very successful product as well, and has as its customers several large blogs and many corporations that use it for both internal blogs and external sites. Six Apart's hosted blogging service (its counterpart to WordPress.com) is TypePad. BoingBoing and Wired's blogs run on Movable Type. My personal blog (no longer being updated) is on TypePad.
TypePad upgrades
TypePad, Six Apart's hosted blog platform, gets new features that make it more capable as a full Web site publishing platform, as opposed to just a blog: The service will get features that make it easier to create static, or nonblog, pages on a site. Usually static pages are used for reference pages, like About pages, but they're also good for longer or more intricately designed pages. (For example, the Webware 100 voting pages are static pages) .
TypePad also launched a new service level, Premium, at $300 a year. It includes more storage and bandwidth than the Pro level ($150 a year), as well as access to a closed community of Premium-level users and invitations to "TypePad Insider Web events."
Movable Type 4
The latest version of the blogging software Movable Type also received some interesting upgrades. The platform, which is designed to host multiple blogs and support a large number of authors, now has community features that let site managers promote readers and commenters to blog authors. There's also a new authoring interface and several management features.
Most interestingly, Movable Type is finally going open source. The company plans to release a freely available, open-source version of its new blogging platform, Movable Type 4, in the third quarter under the General Public License (GPL). Six Apart will continue to license its own version of Movable Type for corporations that would rather have support, and it will also make new feature packs available on its paid product, but now people who want to run, and perhaps enhance, their own special version of Movable Type will be able to do so.
A beta of Movable Type 4 is available now. The open-source version will follow in the third quarter this year.
Disclosure: I was briefed by Chris Alden, an executive vice president at Six Apart. I worked for Alden when we were both at Red Herring, from 1998 to 2001.
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