The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST. Facebook’s press release is here. Live Coverage In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet. 2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over. 2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says. 2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook. → Read More
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well. As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing. The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy. Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options. Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs. Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content. Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently. For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months. CrunchBase Information Technorati Federated Media Glam Media Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Six Apart has introduced an iPhone version of their BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to their blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Facebook. The current version of BlogIt is a traditional iPhone web-based app, though we can expect a native version on the way (Six Apart announced a native version of TypePad at Apple’s WWDC conference earlier this week). You can reach the app by pointing your iPhone’s browser to http://blogit.typepad.com/. The company originally released BlogIt as a Facebook app in April. Both versions currently support posting to Movable Type, TypePad, Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress, along with the social networks mentioned above. The app works well enough, but the release so soon before the release of Apple’s App Store is curious – it will be outdated in a month. CrunchBase Information BlogIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web. Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story. At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog? Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere. Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs. Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears. CrunchBase Information Tokoni Mary Lou Song Alex Kazim Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that will allow bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones. The plugin brings Movable Type to two distinct (and important) markets: Geo-enabled websites and location-based phone services. These features could be a boon to bloggers, especially those that write about real-world locales, such as restaurants or landmarks. They may also help writers reach a much larger audience through mobile phones. The news comes soon after LightPole’s implementation of Yahoo’s geo-information platform FireEagle last month. CrunchBase Information LightPole Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Six apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York based creative agency Apperceptive (this was correctly guessed by Cameron Barret in a Friday post (see comment 156) asking for readers to tell us who they thought Six Apart acquired). Advertising Network – Six Apart Media The company is now competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, the upcoming Technorati ad network and a number of others to get bloggers to join their network. Six Apart has long sold advertising for itself on its network of free blogs on LiveJournal (before it was sold) and Vox. CEO Chris Alden says they have significant experience in grouping like-blogs and selling to large advertisers. The only difference now is that they will partner with the blog publisher and share revenue. They are partnering with Adify to provide back end admin infrastructure for publishers (accounts, payouts, etc.). Six Apart says they’ve been able to group blogs and sell advertising to big brands (HP, MSN, Universal, among others), something that is hard to do without big name publishers. They think they can create a high value ad network for the masses. Currently, sites like FM and Glam provide high value advertisers but only to top sites. If Six Apart can deliver those kinds of advertisers, and the rates they pay, to millions of small blogs, they may have a hit on their hands. There is no requirement that the blogs be using a Six Apart blogging platform. If you can add advertisements to your blog, you can join the network. Six Apart Media is led by David Tokheim. Blog Services – Six Apart Services Six Apart will also begin selling services to blogs for a fee. The core services will be offered by the Apperceptive team in New York, and include site design, back end development, search engine optimization and other services. These services are aimed at larger publishers that can pay, and will also be provided free or at a discount to members of the advertising network. The site isn’t neglecting their smaller customers though, and is also launching consulting services that are designed to help all bloggers maximize their marketing impact. Six Apart Services is led by Marissa Levinson and David Jacobs. CrunchBase Information Six Apart Apperceptive Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has made a significant acquisition, we heard today from someone with knowledge of the deal. “Significant” in the sense of a possible strategic shift for the company, if not in terms of deal size. It will be announced in the next few days. Who did they acquire? Put your best guess in the comments. First comment that is correct gets a 2 GB iPod shuffle with “I Love TechCrunch” engraved on the back. CrunchBase Information Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Six Apart just made designing a blog layout so easy that even a dummy like me can do it. On its TypePad service, it added a few more themes to bring the total up to: “100 themes, over 1000 professional designs, and an infinite number of customization possibilities.” You can try it out here on TypePad’s new Design Assistant, which recently made its debut on Six Apart’s Movable Type. Pick a theme like “Camo Khaki.” Choose a Layout. Add your own custom CSS code if you don’t like the options TypePad gives you. And see how it will look on your blog. This beats the back-and-forth of having to pick out a theme and layout, apply it to your blog, see how it looks, and then go back to tweak. Bringing Web design to the masses is something TypePad does particularly well. WordPress has its own pretty templates too, of course. But blogs on Blogger seem to have the least variation. Which blogging service does the best job of making Web design both drop-dead simple and drop-dead gorgeous? Which Service Is Best At Making Bloggers Look Like a Design Gods? WordPress 65949% of all votes TypePad 55241% of all votes Blogger 1239% of all votes Total Votes: 1334 Started: March 3, 2008 CrunchBase Information Six Apart Automattic Blogger Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel. TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot. CrunchBase Information YouPorn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Although it’s been long-expected, Six Apart finally transitioned its Movable Type blogging software to an open-source license today. In many ways this is a response to the success of WordPress, the open-source blog-publishing software that is increasingly popular, especially among bloggers who like to tweak their own code. (TechCrunch uses WordPress, for instance). Now, Movable Type can benefit from improvements to its code contributed by its most ardent users. The competition should be good for bloggers everywhere who choose to host their own blogs (as opposed to those who use hosted services such as Six Apart’s Typepad or Automattic’s hosted version of WordPress or Google’s Blogger). Six Apart’s Anil Dash, who notes the company’s commitment to openness in general, gives the low-down on how Movable Type took the open-source route. Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is based on Movable Type 4.0. Dash notes: —MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes. —All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached. —MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed. —We’ll be adding additional paid benefits for people who’ve paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes. —You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org. —Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license. —We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects. You can find more details here. CrunchBase Information Six Apart Automattic Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is: Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent). In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said). Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include WordPress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.). CrunchBase Information Imeem Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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