Six Apart News & Events

About a week ago, we launched a beta test of a new application for Movable Type called Motion. It's a powerful new social application that combines the insights we've learned from the smartest social sites across the web with unique new open technologies we've invented here at SIx Apart. We've gotten a great response from the community about Motion, and it's on track for release in early 2009 as a free application for any user of Movable Type Pro.

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.

We've explained each of these principles at length in the Motion announcement on our blog, but the most exciting news is that unlike even a year ago when the number of companies that believed in these principals could be counted largely on one hand, today our partners and peers all over the World and across the web agree with these ideas and have begun the work of connecting all of our sites together.

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.

Back when WordPress 2.5 came out earlier this year, we wrote a cheeky post called "A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide" which pointed out some of the areas where we think our Movable Type platform offered a good option for people who wanted to consider alternatives to WordPress.

But today, WordPress 2.7 is out, and any day a great new upgrade for a blogging platform is released is a day that's good for all bloggers and for the web. So, to celebrate the release of WordPress 2.7, we've put together a list of resources that show how we at Six Apart are committed to helping all bloggers, regardless of platform. Here's a quick list of how Six Apart can help WordPress bloggers. Most of these services are powered by our completely reinvented TypePad infrastructure. And as you'd expect, all of these options are either free or open source or both.

• TypePad AntiSpam: TypePad AntiSpam is like Akismet in that it blocks junk comments on your site. But TypePad AntiSpam is different because it's built on an open source engine, it's free (no matter how you use it) and our users tell us it has fewer false positives, while still being 100% compatible with the Akismet API. We've even got a WordPress plugin that makes connecting to the service a snap, and some great giant WordPress-powered sites like Techcrunch have seen great results with it.

• Six Apart Media Advertising: Want to try actually making money with your blog? We've got over a thousand bloggers in the Six Apart Media advertising program already, with many of their sites powered by WordPress. Both our bloggers and our advertisers tell us they love working with a partner that really understands blogging. (If you're on WordPress.com and can't run your own ads, we can help you get set up with a blog where you can.)

• TypePad Connect: This free service just launched in beta and easily connects to any WordPress.org blog to offer really powerful commenting and beautiful, customizable commenter profiles on your site. Naturally, since OpenID was born at Six Apart, TypePad Connect and these cool new TypePad profiles have OpenID baked in, too. (WordPress.com users can't install a service like TypePad Connect yet, but perhaps you can suggest the idea and hopefully it'll be added.) If you want, you can just get your free TypePad profile and use it to track your comments or to provide links to your other accounts — this replaces the old TypeKey system that you might remember.

• Blog It: This great, free application powered by TypePad lets you easily update multiple blogs and services from an Apple iPhone or right within Facebook. With one click, you can post to blogs on WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger and most other blogs, while also updating your status on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter. Write once, and publish anywhere.

• Blog Link: In an economy like the one we're facing today, even our blogs need to play a role in helping out our careers. We make that easy with our new, free LinkedIn application Blog Link, powered by TypePad. Blog Link automatically displays headlines from any blog you use (whether it's on WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type or anything else) right on your LinkedIn profile. Now the ideas you publish on your blog can be part of what your employers or partners see when they check you out on LinkedIn.

All of these services and tools are just the beginning of what we're already offering to millions of bloggers around the world, regardless of which platform you use to publish your blog. For example, our Six Apart Services team has built some of the biggest social media sites in the world, including ones powered by WordPress, though of course we think they're the best Movable Type and TypePad development teams in the world.

Blogging and the future of the social web is bigger than any one platform or any one company, and that's why we've always offered different platforms for different audiences, and worked hard to be a good resource to all bloggers. So we offer our congratulations to the whole WordPress community on an exciting launch, and especially to the many WordPress bloggers who are Six Apart customers as well.

There are, of course, official docs available if you're looking for help upgrading your WordPress install, and we strongly recommend it as it's important to stay up to date in order to keep your site secure. And finally, while we're of course proud first and foremost of the tremendous effort with put into Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, we do sincerely hope our roster of services offer a nice set of upgrades to make this new version of WordPress even better. Let us know what you think.

I am pleased to announce that today we are welcoming the Pownce team and technology to Six Apart. Pownce launched in June of 2007 and opened to the public earlier this year, but, as mentioned on the Pownce blog, Pownce.com will be closing in the next few weeks. We have a lot of respect for what this team has done and believe we share a common vision about making the Internet more social.

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.

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.

Over the weekend, I posted a simple web page on our TypePad site called the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. I wrote it up with a lighthearted, snarky tone so a few old friends who recently lost their jobs as professional bloggers/journalists would understand what we could do at Six Apart to try to help them out. It seems like the program struck a nerve with thousands more of you, though — those first few friends have passed the link along, and in less than a day, hundreds of journalists have already signed up to participate.

Reports From The Field

The Road Forward

Earlier today, I published the following message on our internal company blog. For those members of our community who wanted to know about the changes at Six Apart today, I've reposted it here publicly for reference.

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Today we are making some changes at Six Apart. We are reducing the size of our full time staff by around 8% and are making some organizational changes as we prepare for 2009. This note is to provide some detail and context around these changes.

Everyone is aware of the challenging economic times we face. The uncertainty of 2009 has made planning very difficult but it is clear that next year looks very different now than it did just a couple of months ago. While it would be easy to just blame “the economy” for these changes, however, the truth is more complex.

This year was one of profound growth and change for Six Apart. In addition to welcoming almost 90 new people and growing to a company of over 200 employees, we launched Six Apart Services, Six Apart Media, Blogs.com, Movable Type Open Source and MT Pro, a suite of TypePad-powered products, including Blog It, Blog Link, the TypePad iPhone app and TypePad AntiSpam, and reached the final stage of the biggest technical project in the company’s history: the migration of TypePad onto a new platform. And, as you all know, we aren’t done yet, with several of our most significant product releases still to come this year.

From a financial point of view, the company continues to grow with Q4 2008 on track to be our biggest revenue quarter ever, and cash flows from our revenue, past financings, and sale of LiveJournal providing funds that will serve us well going into next year and beyond. Despite the challenging economic environment, we estimate that the depth and breadth of our products and services will allow us to continue growing revenue throughout this downturn.

So why are we doing this? First, as with many companies these days we are being proactive about keeping our expenses low. Second, with so many changes in 2008, and looking forward to the changing market 2009, we have to rebalance our organization accordingly.

We've been reminded lately that blogging was born out of the last recession in 2001 - 2002, and that during tough economic times creative voices look to powerful, cost-effective ways to connect and communicate with the world around them. With that backdrop, here are some of the organizational changes we are making and why we feel they are necessary:

• Creating Six Apart “Genius” group. We are refocusing our marketing efforts from promoting Six Apart to helping support our bloggers and clients directly. Our marketing, community, and support groups will merge to create a single team whose mission is to help our bloggers be successful. Despite the economy, or perhaps because of it, we believe that more people will be turning to blogging to promote themselves or their business, and we want to provide them with more than just great technology but also help with getting started, design, building an audience, revenue generation, and more. We are committed to having Six Apart remain the best resource for individual and professional bloggers around the world. Bar none.
• Growing Six Apart Services. Our professional services group has grown significantly as our larger clients are increasingly using Movable Type and TypePad as cornerstones of their broader online strategies. Companies have always come to us to help them compete in a modern, social Internet but now they are also looking for more cost effective ways to run their entire web sites and seeing MT in particular as a complete web content management solution. With this has come the need for more support and services. Today we will be transferring several people from around the company into Six Apart Services and have more open positions in that group.
• One hosted technology team. As we all know, the TypePad migration has been a long and arduous project that organizationally split much of the engineering and ops team around various pieces of that project. As migration completes and we move forward, we are bringing the hosted engineering, analytics, infrastructure, open platforms, and operations teams under one leader, Ben Trott.
• Moving forward with Six Apart Media. While we expect that online advertising will be hard hit by this economy, analysts still expect Internet advertising to grow and we expect that Six Apart Media will continue to grow in 2009. We’ve had tremendous response to our advertising program that we launched in April which now includes almost a thousand bloggers and continues to grow rapidly. We are committed to serving these bloggers and helping them make as much money on their site as possible in this environment. We will continue to grow our sales force and account management teams to meet this need.

Through these changes we have had to make tough choices about the right mix of people to meet these ambitious goals and this has resulted in some job cuts. We have cut other expense lines and the management team and I have agreed to take a 15% salary cut as part of these cost cutting measures. All employees leaving through this layoff will receive a severance package with additional payments to cover health care benefits and we will also offer placement services and do what we can to help them land on their feet. We are very sorry to see these good people go.

The management team doesn’t take these changes lightly and agonized over this decision. However, our first responsibility is to the company as a whole and we feel these changes are the right ones to keep the company competitive, secure, and positioned for future growth.

As I’ve said several times in the past, all companies face adversity from time to time, but the mark of a great company is how it responds. Today is a day when we will be tested. A day to help one another. And a day to say some goodbyes.

Tomorrow will be about redoubling our efforts to create an even stronger focus on what's made Six Apart successful: the bloggers we support.

Thank you for all you do.

As we mentioned in early October, hundreds of bloggers engaged in a friendly competition during the month of October to see who could raise the most money or reach the most kids for Donors Choose, an organization that matches donors with classroom projects specified by public school teachers all over the country.

The results of the competition are in: Once again, Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation blew every other blogger out of the classroom by raising $111,352 and helping over 19,577 students via her giving page. Sarah demonstrated the power of blogging by producing a campaign ad that asked her readers to vote with their wallets. It worked: over the course of October, 1,162 donors “voted” on her challenge.

As the sponsor of the prize for the bloggers who reach the most kids, Six Apart would like to give a shout out to Sarah and to all the winners of the Bloggers Challenge who reached the most students in each category:

(This is our San Francisco team. The New York, Paris, and Tokyo teams send their thanks too.)

Nearly twice as many bloggers attracted 50% more donors than last year, making the competition fiercer than ever. But leaders emerged in each category, and we'd like to acknowledge their fine efforts:

• In the Tech Blog category, Fred Wilson’s AVC blog reached 4,545 students
• In the Science Blog category, David Ng and Benjamin Cohen’s The World’s Fair blog reached 1,780 students 
• In the Topical/Local Blogs category, Ralph Alswang Photography reached 522 students 
• In the Mommy Blog and BlogHer category, Alice of Finslippy reached 1,676 students 
• In the Knitting Blogs category, Rose-Kim Knits reached 597 students 
• In the Music Blog category, music teacher Walt Ribeiro reached 910 kids 
• In the Black Bloggers for Education category, The Assimilated Negro reached 100 students 
• In the Sports Blog category, Sports Crackle Pop reached 465 kids 

In addition to this literal shout out, each winner will receive some choice schwag from our team at Six Apart.

As the creator of three leading blog platforms - Movable Type, TypePad and Vox - and the provider of social media services and advertising solutions, we’re thrilled to participate in an event that raises awareness about the power and influence blogging can have while raising money for a very worthwhile cause: future bloggers of America!

Though we're proud to help create a lot of the coolest technologies around, we don't just make technology for its own sake. That's especially true with all of the concern we've heard from our community about the tumultuous economy and unsteady job market — if we're going to look at some gee-whiz new idea, it better have real value.

What Blog Link Means

What Blog Link Does

Just over a month ago, we released Virtual Movable Type, which gives you all the power of Movable Type Pro on any machine, with no installation in just a few clicks. It's a completely virtualized version of Movable Type that includes not just the application, but all of the infrastructure needed to keep a site running great, from the operating system to the web server to MT itself. We've been excited about it and proud to see it join the MT family.