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Filed under: Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

Movable Type launches Motion social streaming package

The Moveable Type folks at Six Apart have officially released the cross-platform publishing package they announced late last year. It's called Motion, and it's available to Movable Type Pro users now. Motion lets you publish to multiple services at once, and it allows your community members to comment using their existing accounts on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

You can quick-publish a microblog via Motion -- including photos, videos and other rich content -- and you can pull in your activity on other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. This basically seems like a quick and easy way to do the kind of thing social networking geeks have been doing by hand on their own sites. If you're the sort of person who thinks of a website as a community, you definitely want to give Motion a look.

Filed under: News, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

Pownce gets pwned: Six Apart acquires and plans to shutter service



Do you still use your Pownce account? I stopped using mine months ago. I don't even know if I remember the password. If you do still use Pownce, the Twitter-like microblogging service that just never seemed to capitalize on its early hype, start preparing to migrate to something new. Today, Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, announced that it has acquired Pownce and will be shuttering the service in two weeks. Lead Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone will continue on at Six Apart, where presumably some of Pownce's features will be rolled into Vox.

Hey, at least there is Twitter! Seriously though, Pownce's failure is proof that hype alone will not make a product or company a success. As our own Nik Fletcher pointed out, Pownce is the perfect example of how NOT having a useful API at launch or soon thereafter is a huge mistake. Especially if you are trying to do the whole microblogging thing.

Not to get all Valleywag, but didn't Six Apart just lay off 8% of its staff, like three weeks ago? I don't know the particulars of either situation -- but simply on the surface, that's cold. Did something miraculously change or was this part of the plan the whole time?

If you are worried about losing your messages once Pownce powers down its service, the Pownce team has created an export tool which will generate a file (I'm guess its XML. I haven't had a chance to look at it) that can then be imported into Vox, WordPress or TypePad.

Fittingly, the discussion of Pownce's demise is much more active on Twitter and Friendfeed than on Pownce itself.

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Open Source

Movable Type moving to Open Source


Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, released Movable Type 4 (MT4) in beta today and announced it will create an open source version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform sometime this summer. Moving to open source will put MT4 in sync with its main competition, Wordpress, which is also open source.

Some new features include:
  • Updated user interface with a dashboard overview of all your blogs
  • Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT
  • Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system
  • Increased speed
MT4 is available for download and is looking for user feedback prior to its official open source release. With over 50 new features from its previous MT 3.0 incarnation, Six Apart hopes to gain some of its former users who switched to other platforms in response to MT 3.0's licensing requirements and fees.

MT4 has the following requirements:
  • A standard web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x or higher, Apple Safari, Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox), and an FTP utility may be required.
  • Operating Systems: Linux, Solaris/Unix, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows Server
  • Web Servers: Apache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape
  • Databases: MySQL 4.0 or greater, PostgreSQL, SQLite
MT4 is free for personal use and ranges from $200 - $750 for commercial use depending on the number of users. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Thanks FF!


Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Social Software

Syndicate WordPress posts with Vox Crossposter

While Six Apart offers an impressive service with Vox, their blogging community with a focus on 'neighborhoods', it could be argued that the service's doors are a little too closed. While Vox does unique things offering a streamlined registration system to help curb anonymous comments, one thing they don't have is any kind of API to allow access for things like external blogging clients. Sure, it's possible to email and moblog posts in, but it's hard to beat the power and flexibility that a full-on blogging client provides. A lack of an API also makes it difficult to cross-post from any other blogging system besides Six Apart's commercial TypePad blogging service.

That said, Pete Wood offers a bit of a compromise for WordPress users in the form of his Vox Crossposter plugin. Working with the constraints of having to send posts from WordPress via Vox's email system, this plugin will simply send your post - title, image and content - to your Vox account, though not without a few catches. First, none of your categories or tags come along for the ride. Also, your Vox post will more or less live independently from its sibling on WordPress; if you edit your WordPress post, your Vox one won't be updated (and if you aren't careful, it will be posted again unless you remember to tell the plugin to not crosspost the edit), and vice versa.

Still, Pete has done a good job with what Vox unfortunately gives him to work with. Our only request for now (until Vox gets in gear and cranks out an API) is that the plugin defaults to 'do not crosspost', since most posts probably aren't quite syndication material, and it would avoid those unfortunate double-posts.

Pete offers his Vox Crossposter plugin for WordPress free at his site.

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software

SuiteTwo, Intel's Web 2.0 platform

intel suitetwo application platformIntel has collaborated with six software companies to build a next generation collaboration software suite for the productivity of businesses.

SuiteTwo is the name, and the six well known companies participating are piping in their advanced applications to create one single powerful application. NewsGator is supplying RSS, SimpleFeed, Six Apart's Movable Type has the hold on the blogging platform, Socialtext adds in a searchable wiki, SpikeSource provides the hosting, and Visible Path has integrated new social networking capabilities.

Competition for this product can be seen from IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. With their partners in this application, Intel will surely hit the lead spot for this enterprise level business application. The announcement of the release was made at the Web 2.0 conference this week, and the product is available for demo.

[via InformationWeek]

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services, Freeware, Social Software, Unix

Vox has a mobile site and publishing clients

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Vox has mobile site and publishing clients
I have to just come out and admit it: I've gone kookoo for Vox, Six Apart's step-ahead blogging platform and social networking service. They have done a better job than nearly any service I've seen (and believe me; we get our hands on just about everything web 2.0 here at DLS) at making it dead-easy to add audio, books, pictures and video to your posts from sites like YouTube, Flickr and Amazon.

Not content to making users sit in front of their computer all day, however, it looks as though Six Apart answered Jordan's request from back in August and released their mobile publishing client for Vox in a big way, and they even have a mobile site for staying on top of what's going on in your Neighborhood. I honestly don't know how long either of these have been around; I just noticed them while trawling their help files for goodies.

The mobile site is surprisingly functional, offering access to the QotD (Question of the Day), posts and media from your neighborhood, as well as a good portion of your administrative dashboard. The stand-alone mobile client for publishing - available for Windows Mobile 5, Palm OS and Series 60 1st/2nd Edition - is equally impressive. You have access to your phone's media and tools and the ability to customize just about every aspect of your posts; tags, visibility, the whole nine yards.

These two Vox goodies are impressive cross-platform offerings for such a new service (just recently out of beta), and I'm already getting even more hooked on Vox while away from my Mac. Thanks a lot, Six Apart.

Filed under: Blogging, Web services

Six Apart gets funding, buys SplashBlog

Six ApartSix Apart, the company that owns popular blogging software Movable Type and web services TypePad and LiveJournal, has been busy lately. According to TechCrunch, they've raised $12 million in VC funding and, more interestingly (to me, at least), acquried SplashBlog. SplashBlog is a service for blogging and photoblogging from mobile phones and PDAs, and it's reasonable to expect Six Apart to integrate SplashBlog's offerings into its current line-up.

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