Michael Boyle's weblog
John Battelle is reporting on his Searchblog that SixApart has sold LiveJournal to SUP, with whom they had entered into a partnership/localization agreement just over a year ago. I don’t know the details, but it makes sense for 6A to have cut LiveJournal loose – the journalling/social networking product doesn’t really fit into their blog-centric and increasingly enterprise-oriented strategy.
Here’s the press release from Six Apart.
Today Google announced that MySpace, Bebo and SixApart are all joining OpenSocial in addition to the initial group that was reported two days ago. I was under the impression that Six Apart was already on board, but MySpace is the biggest news here anyhow.
This news makes the story even bigger than it already was, but I’m not sure that it checkmates Facebook, or even that it’s an aggressive move against them. I presume they are welcome to join OpenSocial. If there’s a checkmate here, it might be Microsoft whose king has been toppled. The MS investment last week in Facebook was based on a valuation that to a great extent relied on the perceived lock-in that Facebook has on its users. If that lock-in disappears, it completely changes the game.
Even more interesting for me than the Facebook-Microsoft angles to this are some of the unheralded partners in OpenSocial – particularly Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Facebook is phenomenal at what it does, but what it does well is quite limited to “real” non-business social relationships – and despite what many have proposed, I don’t think there was a way for Facebook to route around that. OpenSocial, with both business-focused and personally-focused partners, has potential for growth in far more directions than Facebook has.
One question: whither OpenID? One of the great promises of OpenSocial is federated digital identity plus profiles… Can/will Google make this happen in a way that will keep communities that have thought long and hard about this happy? I sure hope so.
I just caught up with Scoble’s interview with Six Apart over at PodTech.net. It’s a good piece, though if you’ve been involved in blogging in the corporate environment there’s not much new. What was new was the focus the Six Apart gang is putting on getting MT into all of the mashups that are coming into vogue. I think they’re really well positioned to take that a long way.
I just hope that Six Apart doesn’t lose its core constituency first – like me, for instance. Shipping MT4 without an easily extendable library of ready-made templates – and without even providing complete instructions at how to build your own – was a huge mistake.
or Livejournal, and apparently I don’t read many sites using either service because I didn’t notice that there was a huge outage for both of them a day or so ago. Six Apart, the company who runs those services, said simply that it was the victim of a massive DDoS attack. Jason Levine has done a little digging, though, and he found that underneath it all there’s a really interesting story involving an anti-spam operation (which uses questionable tactics), spammers trying to fight back, and what seems to have been a really bad decision: The dishonor of Blue Security.
How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people. I guess the question for people trying to sell blog services to companies is whether they’re out to impress their client or actually sell something.
