Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal

January 4, 2005 9:18 PM

Rumorhas it: Six Apart is buying Live Journal. via Waxy
posted by FlamingBore (77 comments total)

More comment spam for everyone!

Seriously, I wonder why anyone would think it's a good match... unless someone's after the userbase. It surely can't be the code. One, it's terrible. Two, doesn't LiveJournal give its software away to anyone who wants to run their own LiveJournal-like service?
posted by pzarquon at 9:31 PM on January 4, 2005

I wonder if they'll integrate the platforms...
TP and LJ are pretty different under their respective hoods....
posted by gen at 9:32 PM on January 4, 2005

This would have been a marginally interesting post had it been official. As it stands, you're posting rumors to the front page.

Let me reiterate: you're linking a blog post that's talking about a rumor to the front page.

Think about that one.
posted by xmutex at 9:34 PM on January 4, 2005

In other rumors, I am likely to buy at least one karaoke CD+G tomorrow, and will probably buy two or three.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:39 PM on January 4, 2005

LiveJournal is barely even a company. It's an open-source project that charges just enough to pay the minimum numbers of employees need to run it.
posted by smackfu at 9:48 PM on January 4, 2005

Wow, that's a terrible, terrible idea. I really hope it's not true.
posted by keswick at 9:49 PM on January 4, 2005

I have a pretty good feeling this is true, and not just a rumor.

It's probably a good match, but I don't know how many bored teens have credit cards that can pay for a typepad account. It doesn't strictly make a ton of sense to just take over a huge mostly free community, they have to convert everyone to paid users some day to make it worthwhile.

Oh, let me add: OMG! LJ was BUILT TO FLIP!!1!!1!
posted by mathowie at 9:50 PM on January 4, 2005

Livejournal makes more than a million dollars yearly in revenues, with 2.4 million active users. That sounds like a company to me.

I've confirmed with very reliable sources that this is not a rumor. They have, indeed, purchased Livejournal. And it seems like a good fit to me, too.
posted by waxpancake at 9:54 PM on January 4, 2005

I'm starting a rumour that Six Apart is buying Metafilter next. Pass it on!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:54 PM on January 4, 2005

Wait, didn't Kuro5hin do that already?
posted by arto at 9:57 PM on January 4, 2005

Wow. And are they going to start charging all LJ users? If yes, how do they plan on keeping on those nutty LJ kids from switching to their major (and free) competitor, Blogger? And if not, how do they plan on making any money?
posted by keswick at 9:58 PM on January 4, 2005

More comment spam for everyone!

Actually, I get more (email) spam to the shell account I used to sign up with Typekey than I do to any of the others I've used, except the one I used for a while for Radio comments.

Oddly, the un-shelled hotmail account I use for MT-based weblogs gets next to none.

I've never commented on anything at Livejournal.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:58 PM on January 4, 2005

Well, it's eitehr grow or die for a company competing against 2 monopoly machines (google and now microsoft's entry with MSN Spaces). Guess they're choosing to stay in the fight for a while.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:02 PM on January 4, 2005

Given the major foibles in the business dealings at SixApart in 2004, this has the potential to doom LJ. It will be quite sad if this is more than rumor.

6A needs to get their crap together with what they've got before they go buying up anyone else's business, unless they're also buying someone else's business acumen.
posted by Dreama at 10:03 PM on January 4, 2005

The user stats for Livejournal. They currently have 93k paid accounts at $25/year. That's a nice chunk of change, $2.3 mil. I don't think there's any need to charge currently free users, although it would be very hard to resist putting ads on their pages. Ad-free now.

I've always gotten the impression that LJ is run more like a non-profit. Pay for the bandwidth and servers and the salaries of the employees and they're happy. That's what I meant by not being a real company.

The best idea would be to keep the two blogging systems completely separate, and just act like a bigger company. Fat chance of that happening.
posted by smackfu at 10:15 PM on January 4, 2005

this is making me a very sad panda.

(backing up various online notebooks now)
posted by ifjuly at 10:39 PM on January 4, 2005

I smell bullshit!
posted by cheaily at 10:42 PM on January 4, 2005

I moved away from LJ and onto my own MT (and now WP) install when bradfitz said something to the effect of "we have no intentions of creating a business plan" after someone who actually had experience running companies offered their assistance. I've been much, much happier controlling my own stuff.
posted by mrbill at 11:03 PM on January 4, 2005

Though I know it's a sin here on MeFi, I've been an LJ member for a while and have loved my stay there, even with my paid account. One of the things I love is it is an open-source community (I love me some open-source) and I don't feel like they're out to gouge me to make tons of money like every other company out there. When the head-guys respond to people's bitching, they basically say, "Look, we only want your money of you are pleased with our service. If you're not happy, leave." I know other companies say it, but I dunno, the LJ mods just seems genuine about wanting to offer a service for minimal charge with the greatest benifit to its users.
That's just my take, though.
posted by jmd82 at 12:02 AM on January 5, 2005

Can't bring LJ up at all right now. Hopefully it's not a hint of what's to come.
posted by FunkyHelix at 12:06 AM on January 5, 2005

*shrug*
LJ still works for me like a charm. Here's to hoping this is all an evil hoax that will go away when I go to bed....
posted by jmd82 at 12:17 AM on January 5, 2005

if yahoo was smart theyd now buy 6A
posted by tsarfan at 12:46 AM on January 5, 2005

Sixapart is the new microsoft. You will be assimilated!

Seriously, it's just using money to buy up a huge user base, like so many cattle. Blogger was basically dead and buried before google bought them for, what else, millions of eyeballs.
posted by justgary at 1:17 AM on January 5, 2005

Where's insomnia-lj for his take on it?
posted by tracicle at 1:37 AM on January 5, 2005

"6A needs to get their crap together with what they've got before they go buying up anyone else's business, unless they're also buying someone else's business acumen."

Well said. There are only a few reasons for one company to buy another:

1 - To gain market power. This, needless to say, is hardly a factor when we're talking about an online computer service like LJ. Perl is free already.

2 - To obtain advantages of scale. This acquisition looks set to do the opposite: going from a small, all-paying user base to 5.5 million new customers who will have service demands without any compensatory revenue is not the sharpest move.

I see no advantage whatsoever to Six Apart buying up a huge customer base, unless it plans to become an advertising broker instead of a blog software company. This acquisition, if it does go through, will almost certainly prove to be nothing more than a gigantic distraction, and it isn't as if Six Apart is lacking for outstanding customer issues to deal with it as it is: Movable Type's comment management facilities are execrable, and TypePad's are even worse, which is outrageous considering that all users of the latter service are actually paying for it. This all smells to me of a green management with too much VC money to burn.
posted by Goedel at 3:02 AM on January 5, 2005

Six Apart is now less than two years from death. Mark my words. I don't understand how it is that people don't learn from history, especially recent history.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:13 AM on January 5, 2005

Where's insomnia-lj for his take on it?

Or Anil. Or Mena. I think Ben's around here somewhere too, but I forget where.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:17 AM on January 5, 2005

Six Apart...Live Journal

Six Degrees...Live Universe

I guess ALL things really DO come'round again.

/Yeah. I know the lower two didn't merge, just sayin'.
posted by HTuttle at 4:18 AM on January 5, 2005

From the archives: Is LiveJournal taking aim at Blogger? (via)
posted by gi_wrighty at 4:51 AM on January 5, 2005

Wow. And are they going to start charging all LJ users? If yes, how do they plan on keeping on those nutty LJ kids from switching to their major (and free) competitor, Blogger? And if not, how do they plan on making any money?
posted by keswick at 9:58 PM PST on January 4

An important point to note is that LJ's primary differentiation is not its weblogging system but its social networking features. To go from LJ to blogger requires a change in the way you think about weblog interaction.

Useful entries: 1, 2.

LiveJournal is a community; Blogger is just a service. (For years, free accounts were only available via invites which you got from points awarded by helping out in support..)

(Not to say that the LJ community features wouldn't be better implemented in a distributed way (using FOAF, RSS, OPML etc.)
posted by Firas at 5:24 AM on January 5, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm a Livejournal user, and I just wrote an entire post saying what Firas said while I was writing it. I've used Blogger, I've used MT, and for my purposes I'd rather use LJ. My friends are on LJ, and I'd have an LJ account even if I didn't use it for posting--to comment on their entries and have one simple place to check new journal entries.

That's why I think they could get away with charging for LJ use if the amount was small enough, though it could be risky as so many users are teenagers without credit cards.
posted by Jeanne at 5:34 AM on January 5, 2005

Where's insomnia-lj for his take on it?

Or Anil. Or Mena. I think Ben's around here somewhere too, but I forget where.

Not to give too much credence to the old saw that "lack of evidence is a proof of conspiracy", but it is common business practice for corporate officers not to say anything with regard to upcoming mergers and acquisitions. Their silence could be a telling thing.
posted by briank at 5:49 AM on January 5, 2005

Quick question, re: "The deal is a mix of stock and cash..."

Neither of the companies in question are public, are they? Is it considered a "stock deal" if Six Apart is (for instance) giving LJ the Google stock they may or may not own?
posted by Plutor at 6:19 AM on January 5, 2005

if yahoo was smart theyd now buy 6A

What if A9 bought 6A! Ooo ooo! And then 3M buys them both!
posted by ao4047 at 6:26 AM on January 5, 2005

"stock" doesn't have to come from a public company. It can simply represent a percentage of a private one.
posted by rschroed at 6:41 AM on January 5, 2005

" Where's insomnia-lj for his take on it?"

I have no comment at this time.
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:50 AM on January 5, 2005

I have a pretty good feeling this is true, and not just a rumor.

You know something you're not telling us mathowie?

I have an LJ account that lies dormant because I don't like the interface as well as Blogger - I'm lazy and Blogger is easier.
posted by kamylyon at 6:57 AM on January 5, 2005

"I have no comment at this time." (insomnia-lj)

speaks volume for me ;)
posted by mrplab at 7:16 AM on January 5, 2005

" From the archives: Is LiveJournal taking aim at Blogger?"

The main link there is from a statement I made less than three years ago.

I basically said that LiveJournal *should* act competitively, even if it was an open source application. They shouldn't be left behind in the press, they shouldn't be left behind in development, they shouldn't be balkanized and seperate from the blogging world, and they should maximize the window of time that they had before someone big came around and bought Blogger.

Of course, this was basically a manifesto, but the concerns that I expressed at the time have all come true. This post, really, was perhaps the first that got LJ any real attention within the rest of the blogging world. We made it known that we were going to do our best to be competitive, even if it meant breathing down Blogger's neck at times. The results were both effective and at times divisive, but our growth rate went through the roof, doubling every 60 days. About the time I wrote that, LJ was around half the size of Blogger. Six months later, it passed Blogger in total members and beat it out in a write-in campaign for the Webby Awards. Although that level of growth wasn't sustainable until scalability issues were dealt with, our efforts did get the site serious media attention for once, rather than being fodder for daytime talkshows.

As I said back then "Even if (Blogger were to) fail as a business, they would probably be bought out by a bigger company with money to burn. "

And indeed, Blogger never really turned a profit before their acquisition by Google, a company with a stock valuation worth about as much as Ford and General Motors combined.

To me, it all feels a bit like a game of chess. I just saw the end game coming a bit sooner than most.
posted by insomnia_lj at 7:25 AM on January 5, 2005

insomnia_lj - Isn't the separation from the blogging world in general part of the LJ culture? I have both a paid LJ account and an MT blog, and know they attract different kinds of posts from me and comments from people.

The LJ community is insular, they don't seem to want to be part of the blogging network (blogosphere as it were) as a whole. That turned out to be a clever trick to get users. "I'll just create an account to comment" becomes "I better post to let people know I'm just using this account for comments" becomes "I usually don't post, but this quiz is too funny..." becomes "I'm posting too many personal things here so I'm going friends-only."

That winds up causing a split between blogosphere-bloggers and LJ-bloggers, (warning: over-generalization and stereotyping ahead) the former seeing the latter as a bunch of people posting too-personal snippets that aren't interesting if you don't know the person in question, the latter seeing the former as self-important pundits who are more concerned with technology than people.

The closed-loop of LiveJournal allows for people to post "Why did you add me?" comments that you won't see elsewhere, but it also closes off people looking for open systems.

As a fan of both parties (for different reasons) I'll be very interested to see how it plays out.
posted by revgeorge at 7:47 AM on January 5, 2005

Obsnark: I can't wait for the whining about the pricing structure if you have more than one journal ;)

Perhaps it's time for me to consider going back to hosting my journal myself. I've never been really happy with my data on someone else's server, anyway. LiveJournal is usually okay, and to be honest, it's been better lately than Blogger (which I also use), so I didn't feel any sense of urgency, that is, until now.
posted by tommasz at 8:41 AM on January 5, 2005

"Isn't the separation from the blogging world in general part of the LJ culture?"

Both LiveJournal *AND* Blogger are, to some extent, gated communities... even if Blogger users don't always see it that way. They only see LJ's walls, not their own. Can anyone, for instance, argue persuasively that Blogger's lack of RSS support benefits its users? I know I can't.

Separation is a bad thing as far as any project's longterm viability. Openness, however, grows your business. That is why I championed free, unlimited RSS syndication for LiveJournal accounts as early as late 2000. LJ beat a lot of people when it came to offering syndication, but even still there was a lot of time-consuming bickering over even *having* syndication, much less making it a free feature that delayed its rollout considerably. The fear was that LiveJournal would be discouraging people from actually using the site.

LiveJournal *still* isn't as connected as I would like to see. One of the big ideas that grew out of open sourcing the software was to create numerous LiveJournal-code sites worldwide, and to connect those sites (and other weblog sites) as transparently as possible. For instance, if you wanted to add someone (or participate in a community) that was based on a LiveJournal site in India, then you could do so within LiveJournal. This unfortunately never happened. Much of the reason for it was a fear that LiveJournal would lose members to other LJ-code sites. What *wasn't* discussed was the advantages that would also come from having this functionality.

This is just one small example of conflicts that can arise between what makes functional sense for people to create and what appears to make business sense for LiveJournal.com, the business entity. I think that the business perspective of many of LJ's staff, however, was shortsighted. LJ could've -- and in my opinion should've -- aimed for being as open as possible -- the largest piece of a much bigger pie.

From an open source perspective, an interconnected network of sites make all the sense in the world. If you're a good coder, you could design the code to do this on your own over the course of a few weeks. Good luck getting it approved into LJ's code base, however.

Imagine that Blogger was open source software. How would you feel about Google, Inc., a multi-billion dollar company, making the decisions about what code went into future versions of Blogger? How would you feel if you had contributed open source code to Blogger in the past, only to have Google become its gatekeeper?!

'nuff said.
posted by insomnia_lj at 9:07 AM on January 5, 2005

One day there will be consolidation among all the various players who allow people to put some or all of their life online. Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. etc. etc.

6A seems to be banking on that fact, pre-consolidating before Yahoo etc. moves to acquire and consolidate.

Historically, this can either be a great thing, or it can help lead to a company's demise.
posted by chaz at 9:53 AM on January 5, 2005

Movable Type's comment management facilities are execrable, and TypePad's are even worse, which is outrageous considering that all users of the latter service are actually paying for it.

MT's comment stuff is kind of messed up right now, but every blog engine is having problems with it. I find TypePad's comment spam to be a thing of the past. Since they are centralized, they can easily identify comment spam and deal with it. I don't get any comment spam on my TP sites anymore, and the few that do trickle in get auto-deleted before I have to do anything.
posted by mathowie at 10:18 AM on January 5, 2005

LJ Archive - Windows software that allows you download and back up your LJ entries.
posted by exhilaration at 10:42 AM on January 5, 2005

If we get bought by 3M, do I have to move to Minnesota? Cool! Prince lives in Minnesota!
posted by anildash at 10:48 AM on January 5, 2005

being a LJ blogger myself, I was concerned when I saw this. I do know Brad Fitz, and I've sent him and Jesse (thier public affairs person) an email asking for confirmation.

I know that their primary revenue comes from members fees, but also from the installation, hosting, and service of their open scource code to people starting their own communities. It's my understanding that the company is privately held and while the inventor himself seems pretty well off, he continues to work very hard.

I'll see if I can get some clarification. It's the least a neo-metaphyte can do :)
posted by djdrue at 11:11 AM on January 5, 2005

I couldn't imagine 6A forcing all of the LJ users to pay money or change the way the system works in an extreme way. After MT 3.0 was released, 6A started charging and they pissed off a lot of people with their purchase options. I'm not sure how the user bases compare, but they would be crazy to force all 2.4 million LJ users to pay.

Like someone else said, LJ is about community. If you lose 75% of your user base to turn some cash quick, there won't be much of a community left. Whatever changes they make should only encourage more interaction (think TypeLists, integrated Amazon Wishlists, photo albums, etc.).

Also, it makes sense that 6A wants to have a free, hosted blogging tool. By purchasing LJ, they would have three products that all offer different things. I think this could be a great move and I'm excited to hear what they have to say if/when they officially announce it.
posted by capndesign at 11:36 AM on January 5, 2005

FYI, eWeek has reportedly confirmed the rumor
posted by insomnia_lj at 12:07 PM on January 5, 2005

(Not to say that the LJ community features wouldn't be better implemented in a distributed way (using FOAF, RSS, OPML etc.)

This is my theory: Six Apart is going to look into hooking their two properties together. Imagine the TypeKey and LJ user bases being able to comment across sites, all of the LJ posts available via RSS, and the LJ friends functionality (where it has a page on your site that shows the recent posts of your friends) as an aggregate of RSS feeds.

TypePad has a lot of personal and for-friends functionality, but it's really a "community" as much as it is a bunch of hosted sites (including some sites that are less personal, like PVRblog). You get the feeling that you have your own website, and any community is in the interaction within that site. LJ users never really claim to have a website, usually they just call it their LiveJournal. I could see where some TypePad users would like the functionality of TypePad with the community of LiveJournal, just as some LiveJournal users would love more interoperability.
posted by mikeh at 12:29 PM on January 5, 2005

"I find TypePad's comment spam to be a thing of the past. Since they are centralized, they can easily identify comment spam and deal with it."

It isn't the Cialis-flogging types who get my goat, but my inability to stop persistent trolls from besmirching my comments sections with their rubbish. TypePad's centralized filtering does nothing to stop targeted attacks from such individuals.

To give an example, I've been fending off several anonymous kooks from certain sites obsessed with "human biodiversity" (i.e, Steve Sailer style racist pseudoscience) for the last few weeks, and IP banning just doesn't do the job. Not only is it too crude a measure for my taste, what with many of them using dynamic IP addresses, but TypePad doesn't even have a means of blocking address ranges - use "X.Y.Z.*" or "X.Y.Z" and you find that the same people can still comment, except now their addresses show up as 127.0.0.1! It makes no sense to me either that the TypeKey service available to MT users isn't also available to TypePad subscribers: to the extent it raises the costs of obnoxious behavior, the option of using the service is to be welcomed, whatever its other shortcomings.

MT users at least have the option of installing plugins or tweaking the source code to fix problems like this, while TypePad users who pay have to just sit back as their queries are brushed off with "our developers might consider this for a future release", and there isn't even a forum-type feature at the TypePad website for subscribers to use to compare notes, exchange tips, hash out priority feature requests, etc. Generally, Six Apart just isn't all that solicitous of feedback from users who aren't "a-listers": one has a much better chance hearing from their developers by commenting on, say, Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal than one would by writing to them directly.
posted by Goedel at 12:37 PM on January 5, 2005

"Imagine the TypeKey and LJ user bases being able to comment across sites, all of the LJ posts available via RSS, and the LJ friends functionality"

Yeah, well it would be nice if they could get TypeKey and TypePad to work together first ...
posted by Goedel at 12:40 PM on January 5, 2005

Seriously, wtf. I haven't commented on a TypePad-hosted site in a while so I completely forgot that they haven't put those two together yet. I hope they're not stuck in some "let's put out a big release every X months" plan, because it'd be a lot more beneficial to add things like this incrementally over time. Or at least synch up TypePad changes with MT changes.
posted by mikeh at 1:02 PM on January 5, 2005

If we get bought by 3M, do I have to move to Minnesota? Cool! Prince lives in Minnesota!

Yeah, but 3M's and Prince's compounds are on, like, totally different sides of the Twin Cities. If they make you live near 3M, the best you can do is slum with Garrison Keillor.
posted by COBRA! at 1:23 PM on January 5, 2005

I got a Livejournal a few years ago, and now my MT blog is pretty much dead. Why? Because I managed to get most of my friends onto LJ, and they're a hell of a lot more willing to read their friends page than go to my site every day.

Yeah, LJ is full of teenyboppers. The design and code might be shit. But it's far, far more open a community than I found elsewhere. And even when I tried to move the people I got on LJ back out into real blogging, it didn't work as well as I hoped.

::shrug:: They all have their positives. But I found LJ to be far more accessible for my friends who are new to blogging and journaling. Hell, it's got more features than Blogger, if you can look past the horrid templates.

And 6A isn't exactly golden at the moment. I think they're overcharging for MT 3.0 and Typepad. (Typekey? Pah!) Not impressed. Meanwhile, I'm more than willing to shell out $35 for a year and some extra features at LJ.

Really, the only thing I see 6A offering LJ is better templates and a thin veneer of respectibility - and that only for those unwilling to look past the teens and memewhores.

It's an odd combo. I don't really know what to expect in the end, and I'm more than a little afraid of how it'll turn out.
posted by fujikosmurf at 1:43 PM on January 5, 2005

"Yeah, well it would be nice if they could get TypeKey and TypePad to work together first" "it'd be a lot more beneficial to add things like this incrementally over time"

I totally agree. I think everyone here at 6A does too.
posted by anildash at 2:08 PM on January 5, 2005

From what I gather, the Six Aparters definitely have respect for the Livejournal community. I've gone back and reread this post from Mena's Corner which I now take in a different light. Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly knit bonds in weblogging.:

The most common insult towards personal weblogs are that they're all about what you ate for lunch, what you did over the weekend, etc. And to the vast majority of people, what I ate for lunch doesn't matter; but to a small select group of family and friends, they'll probably be interested in knowing that I had a really good dinner, or a really good lunch, or hearing about a trip I took. The personal weblog is content-driven, not audience-driven; it's not about trying to write content that pleases a mass audience — it's about finding an audience that wants to read what you write.

Of course, to make this possible, tools need to evolve. Many weblogging tools now provide mechanisms for password-protecting a weblog; but not that many allow you to assign a more granular level of control. But it's perfectly reasonable to think that you might have a weblog where you post both about the sandwich that you ate for lunch—a post intended for, and readable by, only a handful of people—and your thoughts on a new piece of technology from Apple, intended for a mass audience. These two pieces of content can and should co-exist, but one should be visible to a small audience, and the other to a large audience.

And just like that, the true "weblogging revolution" will occur when no one thinks of what they're doing as "weblogging."

posted by kathryn at 2:22 PM on January 5, 2005

While LJ is full of teenyboppers, I don't care because I don't have them on my friends list.
posted by smackfu at 2:23 PM on January 5, 2005

"all of the LJ posts available via RSS"

This is already automatic.

I hope I don't lose my permanent account status. I also hope my permanent account doesn't become worthless.
(Full disclosure, I have both an lj account and a regular bl—webjournal. I use the livejournal for communication with my friends, and the webjournal for communication with my family. The lj tends to be more personal and emotional, so no one in my family other than my younger brother knows I have it. I have been an lj volunteer, but I have never been employed by them.)
posted by Eideteker at 4:55 PM on January 5, 2005

Generally, Six Apart just isn't all that solicitous of feedback from users who aren't "a-listers": one has a much better chance hearing from their developers by commenting on, say, Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal than one would by writing to them directly.

Well, I suppose it depends on what you consider solicitous. Hi, Jay Allen here. Product Manager for Movable Type.

Just because no one at Six Apart responds to some call on your weblog for a certain feature doesn't mean we don't care. Sometimes, we don't see them (although you'd be surprised how much we catch in the blogosphere regarding our products).

Sometimes we see them and like them — so much so that they are often already in development. Of course, since it's a strict company policy not to talk about or promise future features and functionality, we're probably not going to respond.

Sometimes we see them and realize that they aren't good for the product (either because we're going in another direction or because the idea is just not well thought out). In that case, I've often tried to point out where the problems are and why the suggestion will never see the light of day in the source code. Personal responses however, don't scale well...

In any case, I personally could care less whether a good idea comes from Jason Kottke or Jenny Wagner from Pascagoula, Mississippi and I know that Byrne (the TypePad Product Manager) feels precisely the same way. There is no cabal.

If you've got a suggestion that you think is really killer you can ALWAYS write it up and notify us of it (contact at sixapart dot com). Like I said above, you will not always get a response. There are 6 million of you and two of us and we can't waste our time typing up responses to each feature request. But I can promise you that you will always be heard.

I think Six Apart has proven very well in the past that the company listens to its users. To not listen would be a ridiculous breach of responsibility both for us as professionals and for the company as a whole.
posted by fooljay at 7:01 PM on January 5, 2005

hey, anil, is that a confirmation? :)
posted by mwhybark at 8:11 PM on January 5, 2005

There is no cabal.

You forgot the ™, Jay. In fact, that'd be a good advertising tagline for the MT product line, don't you think?

Six Apart: There is no Cabal™.

Hire me, dang it! I got a million of 'em!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:16 PM on January 5, 2005

Also: very interesting discussion about the 'cultural divide' between lj and mt/tp here, via our own Gen Kanai.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:24 PM on January 5, 2005

Brad confirms.
posted by Eideteker at 9:11 PM on January 5, 2005

Brad used the phrase "Six Apart "gets it" when it comes to open source" I ask this: since bloody when? 6A has never had an open source product, so what proof is there that they "get" open source?

I retain my dire predictions and renew my search for a class which will teach me how to write my own (open source) CMS.
posted by Dreama at 9:20 PM on January 5, 2005

How about their release of Standalone Trackback?
posted by ElfWord at 11:26 PM on January 5, 2005

"I ask this: since bloody when? 6A has never had an open source product, so what proof is there that they "get" open source?

I retain my dire predictions and renew my search for a class which will teach me how to write my own (open source) CMS"

You've never had an open source product, nor have you released a single line of code with an OS license, am I right? But I somehow wouldn't feel justified in making any assertions whether you "get it" about open source.

There's, yes, the Standalone Trackback implementation. There's Crypt::DSA, XML::Atom, XML::FOAF, and XML::Feed, all of which are terrific Perl modules Ben put up on CPAN. That guy over there? He made Soap::Lite. And I can probably rattle off a half-dozen more if I took the time.

Oh, and the folks who just joined us? They made memcached and Perlbal. No, not as sexy as Firefox, but they help run sites you might have heard of, like Wikipedia and Slashdot. And, oh yeah, what's likely the largest open-source-powered community site in the world, LiveJournal.

I hope your dire predictions are based on judgement that's better than your skill at assessing a team's commitment or experience with Open Source applications.
posted by anildash at 12:04 AM on January 6, 2005

I haven't personally coded an open source product, because that's not what I do. If I wrote software, I wouldn't give a fig about Six Apart. (For the record, I am the managing partner of a software company that has three OS licensed education software products out right now, and two more the development pipeline.)

I will stand corrected on development of OS product by 6A and products by 6A staffers. I will not, however, retract my dire predictions. I've had a significant lack of positive expectations for 6A for the last year or so (because I've been a firsthand witness to a severe lack of professionalism in the ranks at 6A above and beyond the 3.0 licensing debacle and the boondoggle which is Typekey) and this move hasn't served to renew the high opinion I once had (back when the company focus was making the best personal publishing CMS) in the slightest. That's just how it goes. To get it back, a lot of changes would have to be made in the 6A business ethic, none of which are going to occur because of the purchase of Danga.
posted by Dreama at 4:57 AM on January 6, 2005

"I've had a significant lack of positive expectations for 6A for the last year or so (because I've been a firsthand witness to a severe lack of professionalism in the ranks at 6A above and beyond the 3.0 licensing debacle and the boondoggle which is Typekey) and this move hasn't served to renew the high opinion I once had (back when the company focus was making the best personal publishing CMS) in the slightest. That's just how it goes. To get it back, a lot of changes would have to be made in the 6A business ethic, none of which are going to occur because of the purchase of Danga."

Translation: I'm not going to reveal any details you can possibly address, but I am going to go on smearing you.

Nicely done. Do you give workshops in this kind of thing?
posted by pnh at 8:31 AM on January 6, 2005

Soap:Lite, xml::foaf. blagh any more tablescraps you want to give the OSS community?

HMM.. I heard Mena Trott just took a massive shit. I wonder if i should post about it on the frontpage...
posted by Dreamghost at 6:34 PM on January 6, 2005

And indeed, Blogger never really turned a profit before their acquisition by Google, a company with a stock valuation worth about as much as Ford and General Motors combined.

Exactly. People seem to have lost sight that blogger was a failed business. Wonderful idea, wonderful product, changed the internet (as told by pcmag), and yet a business run into the ground and saved by google. And at the time they bought blogger many said it made little sense.

And it probably didn't, but it's about the eyeballs.
posted by justgary at 11:40 PM on January 6, 2005

And it probably didn't, but it's about the eyeballs.

Didn't the eyeball business model go out in 2000?
posted by madman at 5:19 AM on January 7, 2005

Stavros: "There is no cabal" is already the trademarked property of Kuro5hin.org Inc. Continuing to infringe will cost you dearly, young man.

Also, I'd just like to note that the Trackback Standalone implementation is total crap. You guys don't really want to be hanging your open-source cred on that, seriously. :-)
posted by rusty at 5:24 AM on January 8, 2005

Stavros: "There is no cabal" is already the trademarked property of Kuro5hin.org Inc. Continuing to infringe will cost you dearly, young man.

Dude, we've been saying that since the hey-day of Usenet. Bring it, baby. Prior art... :-)
posted by fooljay at 7:56 PM on January 9, 2005

fooljay: No one from Usenet had the good sense to claim its use for a corporate entity. It is vital to the future of Innovation for my company to steal stuff out of the public domain and own it for the rest of time.
posted by rusty at 5:01 AM on January 10, 2005

"Wonderful idea, wonderful product, changed the internet (as told by pcmag), and yet a business run into the ground and saved by google."

great idea, bad management.
posted by mrplab at 3:39 PM on January 10, 2005

Continuing to infringe will cost you dearly, young man.

I am insulated by a thick layer of kimchi, my friend! I scoff!

*scoffs*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:53 PM on January 10, 2005