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.
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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