Six Apart has been acquired by advertising network VideoEgg and merged into the company’s rebrand as SAY Media.
Six Apart is perhaps best known for their self-hosted blogging platform Movable Type and their hosted blogging service TypePad. Though SAY Media will not discontinue these products, it remains to be seen how the advertising network will influence their future.
A former power-house in the blogging industry, Movable Type’s popularity began to falter when Six Apart released version 3 in 2004 with more restrictive licensing. In fact, the Google Trends graphs for Movable Type and WordPress are almost inverse of each other, showing a steady decrease in Movable Type popularity and a steady increase in WordPress popularity beginning at roughly the same time as Movable Type 3’s release.
If you’re unsure about the future of your Movable Type or TypePad blog, now is as good a time as any to move to WordPress as your new self-hosted blogging platform or WordPress.com as your new hosted blogging service. After either installing WordPress or signing up with WordPress.com, go to Tools/Import in your admin panel and select “Movable Type and TypePad.”
What’s your take on this acquisition? Is Six Apart’s legacy safe in the hands of SAY Media (formerly VideoEgg)?
One option if you want to stay with a Movable Type-based system but are concerned with the future is Melody.
http://openmelody.org/
See also:
http://forums.movabletype.org/.....or-me.html
http://groups.google.com/group.....d4bcb439fd
As you noted though, MT never recovered from the licensing debacle exodus. And this just makes it even more unlikely.
Thanks for bringing this up! I’ve actually never heard of Melody before. It looks very promising.
That would be why they got rid of Vox, then. Not only was it a poorly-maintained, little-used drain on resources that no buyer would want to take on, it would also be rendered redundant by an ad-supported version of TypePad. Apparently TypePad Micro (their free Tumblr-style offering) doesn’t have ads right now, but I can’t see that lasting.
Anyone planning to move from TypePad to wordpress.com should of course be aware that it’s not an equivalent service (it’s already ad-supported and will not allow them to display their own ads in place of or alongside Automattic’s). Depending on their current price plan and desired featureset, it might be more appropriate to switch to Squarespace, who also have import tools.
I used to use MT for my blogs, and it was great waaaay back in the day. But I am an advocate for WordPress and having one self hosted….as I can do a lot more self hosted then using wordpress.com’s free service…and even the paid version doesn’t allow massive flexibility. Go go self hosted…and RIP Movable Type.
I tried TypePad couple of years again ago but quickly adopted WordPress for its ease of use and the plethora of plugins and themes available. Why pay for a blog platform when an even better on e is available for free.
I am all for self-hosted blogs: you have total control and you “really own” the data you created.
This truly marks another chapter (the end maybe) of what seems like a lifetime of rivalry between WordPress and Movable Type. There was a time when the rivalry was fun and inspiring for a lot of WordPress aficionados.
This is like deja vu. There was a prediction of this happening posted on TechCrunch when Vox was scheduled to close shop. Now I’d love to see the SA CEO explain his way out of “flatly denying that his company has been acquired, or that it is in the process of a merger.”
Nice scaremongering, but the fact is that development of both Melody and Movable Type is healthy. SixApart Japan has already been given the green light to not only keep building 5.1 and supporting 4.3, but to aggressively pursue new Movable Type business.
As for Melody, its development is getting very close now to a real beta release.
What scaremongering exactly? They were acquired and, besides the fact that Movable Type and TypePad will not be discontinued, the impact of the acquisition is still unknown. It’s common sense.
If you’re concerned, there are ways to leave MT and TP. If you aren’t concerned, there’s nothing wrong with staying there.
No scaremongering intended.
Let’s say Matt Mullenweg and Mark Jaquith got bored with WordPress and moved on. If SixApart said “if you’re worried about the future of WordPress, now would be a great time to switch to Movable Type,” WordPress fans would be coming out of the woodwork calling it scaremongering.
Having seen that reaction to a tongue-in-cheek article by Anil Dash about how Movable Type 4.0 was a great upgrade to WordPress, I have some basis to my cynicism here… 😛
Six Apart’s legacy wasn’t safe with Six Apart! They’ve been neglecting ordinary bloggers and the blogging platform in favour of business/corporate clients for years now, and this is just the natural conclusion. It’s so hard to move a blog that they now have millions of hostage “content creators” to use as advertising platforms. Great way to make money, I suppose, but it’s not what blogging is about.
Oh, wordpress.com has had the same emphasis upon ‘VIP’ clients at the expense of ordinary bloggers for years; you only have to look at their front page to see that. Yes, it’s sad to see companies abandon their original userbase in favour of, say, shilling for Microsoft, but in the present economic climate they don’t have a lot of choice.
Good for Six Apart, never had the opportunity to try MT, with so many options I think it comes down to what you are familiar with and ease of use, for me this happens to be wordpress, but I am open to new apps and plan to give it a try in a test environment.
Three Words: SCREW Six Apart.
After the way that they trashed Matt, WordPress, and those that use it; I got nothing good to say about those rat bastards.
I look well forward to the day when Six Apart goes out of business. I WILL have a damned party.
A$$hole bastards.
-Pat
Owner
politicalbyline dot com
MT waited too long to become open source. I’ve had to use it and its a pain setting up templates, even if you set them up as “linked” templates you still have to go in and define the linking for each template for each blog. The only advantage MT has over WordPress is that it allows for multiple blogs with 1 install, but I believe WordPress is going to allow that in the future. Until then if you really need multiple blogs, use b2evolution, I used to use that for my first blog.
With the release of WordPress 3.0 you can make a normal WordPress install a multisite install just by making a few minor changes.
Having spent some time asking ordinary bloggers around I can’t help but notice one thing – basic WordPress.com account is free, basic TypePad account is $8.95 a month. The TypePad Micro is very downplayed, I didn’t even see it first few times when I was checking out their web site. For people who aren’t very serious but want to make their first few steps this is a great deal of difference.
Of course, once they commit to blogging, they mostly start using standalone versions of system they already familiar with, so no surprise WordPress is a clear winner here.
A wordpress.com account is not free. It is advertising driven. They place adverts on your site.
I started out with MT when I self hosted my blogs. I switched to WordPress because my web host was cramping the script processes MT used. It got to the point that I was getting constant 503 errors just trying to rebuild pages. Using dynamic page builds was too hard for me to figure out and the community help about it was lacking.
The database model that WordPress uses worked right out of the box without needing a computer programing degree.