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Does Six Apart suck?

Does Six Apart suck?

That’s the question that Ben Bleikamp writes about over at Bleikamp.com. And his answer is… Six Apart sucks (really)….

I’ve shouted my view of the lack of innovation at Six Apart before. Suffice to say that I’ve really already said everything I really have to say on this matter already. They’ve lost the blog innovation game to platforms like WordPress

Do they suck? I dunno.. but I’m certainly not that impressed with their product line anymore..

View Comments (9)
  • Just curious how you define “innovation”. Clearly, you don’t consider these things as innovation

    * open source contributions (our LiveJournal team has contributed platform technology that supports sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and Facebook)
    * business manageability of blogs (nobody has the same level of integration with enterprise software like Oracle as Movable Type does)
    * the number of different audiences reached (we’ve got offices all over the world, and partnerships in major countries where we don’t have offices)
    * Openness in the content we encourage you to blog (Vox supports including content from Amazon or from Google’s YouTube or Yahoo’s Flickr)

    I’d absolutely agree we haven’t spent a lot of time trying to seem cool to the Web 2.0 crowd, since we’ve been busy getting millions of people to start blogging. Maybe you should think of “innovation” in the broader context of getting people to adopt a new technology.

  • My god, when will the SixApart bashing ever end!

    SixApart’s flagship products (MovableType and TypePad) are geared towards corporate customers now. And their new serivce, Vox, seems like a step in the right direction for casual bloggers.

    Why isn’t anyone writing about the fact that Blogger.com has remained stagnant for years. They don’t even support categories for crying out loud.

  • Haasim, if I remember correctly Typepad and Movable Type used to be consumer products, but they had to shift their focus and marketing when their lunch started getting eaten by WP.

    Anil, your points don’t exactly follow.

    Open source contributions? Memcache, which I believe is the only open source technology developed by LJ that is used by the three sites you mention, was developed and released TWO YEARS before Six Apart decided to burn some VC and buy Livejournal. In fact since then, all the innovation in that product has come from outside sources, like Smugmug and Facebook. I’m sure you can point to some dinky CPAN modules or something, but all of the cool stuff (and most of your users) have come from one brilliant guy Brad who you acquired after he had been doing his thing for 5+ years.

    “business manageability of blogs” is a BS phrase. Oracle support does not a business product make.

    “the number of different audiences reached” more empty phrases. Most open source software is translated into 20++ languages by the community and usually have a larger international audience than a US one. You could probably do the same thing, if you still had a community left. All of your products have crappy RTL support, don’t support non-gregorian calendars, and have bad or non-existent international permalinks. But yes, you’re so worldly because you have offices in Japan, San Francisco, and Paris.

    “Vox supports including content from Amazon or from Google’s YouTube or Yahoo’s Flickr” I do this on almost every other site on the web just fine, thanks. In fact, Youtube and Flickr have built-in tools or posting to blogs.

    “we’ve been busy getting millions of people to start blogging” I could take that more seriously if you put your real numbers out there outside of Livejournal, and included activity stats. Take out Livejournal, and Typepad/MT/Vox combined probably have less users than WordPress.org.com, which is sad when you think of how much money have been poured into them.

  • Haasim: Probably because due to that stagnation, the only people who care that much about Blogger anymore are those already using it and satisfied with what they have. The others left long ago.

    For what it’s worth, the current Blogger beta program has (finally!) supported categories for a few months now, among some other things. I’ve never used it much, but recently had to move someone off the service.

  • Why isn’t anyone writing about the fact that Blogger.com has remained stagnant for years. They don’t even support categories for crying out loud.

    Because Blogger is old old old news

  • The new Blogger is actually pretty good, and very fast to use. It’s probably going to hurt WordPress.com’s numbers since I bet that’s where most of their users come from.

  • Haasim, if I remember correctly Typepad and Movable Type used to be consumer products, but they had to shift their focus and marketing when their lunch started getting eaten by WP.

    Aah you have it the wrong way round. WordPress only became this popular because Six Apart announced that with Movable Type 3.0 it would be targeting the professional/corporate market more so than the personal. I doubt WordPress would be as significant a player had Movable Type/Six Apart had the whole licensing debacle!

    You seem to have got the two mixed up :)

  • “I doubt WordPress would be as significant a player had Movable Type/Six Apart had the whole licensing debacle!”

    I think we’re saying the same thing from different angles. SA had a complete LOCK on blogging, they owned it all. Light years past Blogger and b2 and Greymatter and all that. I don’t think they gave that up deliberately.

    As far as I know WordPress has never focused on enterprise stuff.

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