Six Apart Announces TypePad Platform and TypePad Developer Program

Founded in 2001, with its headquarters in San Francisco, and offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York City, Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software and services company, is opening up the TypePad Platform to developers for the quick and easy development of social applications that make use of TypePad’s smart cloud and API. By using the TypePad Platform, developers can run a social app on a single web server, leaving the storage, infrastructure and organization of social graph data and social objects to the TypePad cloud.

Six Apart is also open sourcing TypePad Motion, the first social app built on the platform, to help organizations and individuals start their own microblogging community and quickly enjoy the benefits of deeper relationships with customers, fans, or community members. Derived from the Pownce code base, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2008, developers can use TypePad Motion as a reference as they build other social apps on the TypePad Platform. Several TypePad Motion sites are in production and illustrate the benefits of branded communities.

"We believe this is a better way of building social web sites," said Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. "Just as Six Apart made social publishing accessible to millions with our blog tools, our goal with the TypePad Platform is to make the next generation of social applications much easier to build and scale."

Six Apart occupies the number one position in the U.S. blog category, and its properties reach a potential audience of over 180 million unique users worldwide, according to comScore’s August numbers. The TypePad Platform gives website owners the opportunity to run their own independently branded social applications while being easily available to members of other TypePad-supported sites through easy login to the cloud. Visitors can become members of TypePad Motion sites using their Facebook, Twitter, TypePad, or OpenID logins.

The TypePad Platform
Known as the leading paid blogging service since its inception in 2003, TypePad has been rebuilt from the ground up over the past year as it has introduced social networking features such as profiles, followers, microblogging, and status updates to its members. At the same time, it has become a platform on which social apps can be built, making use of a robust API that carries and organizes social data to and from the TypePad cloud. The API is available to developers in preview to allow early feedback to the TypePad team.

"We’ve been experimenting with TypePad Motion with some of our artists and are tremendously excited about the results and creative possibilities," said Eric Case, VP of Marketing Platforms for EMI Music. "TypePad Motion is an ideal developer platform for connecting artists and fans – it elegantly aggregates content from services that artists may already use, and has built-in social tools to let their most passionate fans congregate and share their experiences in a single place online."

The TypePad Developer Program
The TypePad Developer Program provides developers with the early access beta version, or Developer Preview, of the TypePad API. Documentation and the TypePad Motion open source application, which can easily be adapted for other social apps, is also available. Developers will find a forum, mailing list and group where they can get their questions answered quickly. For more information on the TypePad Developer Program, developers may visit developer.typepad.com.

"I’m excited to see that Six Apart’s developer program is opening up a smart new way to build social apps," said Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg and of Pownce. "Less than a year after its acquisition of Pownce, Six Apart is set to spark the development of new and innovative apps on its cloud platform."

TypePad Motion
TypePad Motion is the inaugural open source application built by Six Apart for the TypePad Platform. A microblogging app derived from Pownce for fostering communities, TypePad Motion is written in Python using the Django framework, making it extremely easy to build and customize.

A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others. A Featured User can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities.

Charter TypePad Motion Communities
Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites. Film and TV star Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) shares exclusive photos, videos, and personal updates with his fans on his community site, stimulating conversation and the exchange of fan photos, videos and updates. Mr. Quinto’s site was built by Six Apart Services, creator of award-winning sites for some of the most influential brands on the web.

"We’re growing robust fan relationships that we can activate in support of Zachary’s projects, and our experience working directly with those fans to build the community has been creative and fruitful on both sides. TypePad Motion and Six Apart are key to our strategy," said Neal Dodson, partner in Before the Door Pictures, Zachary Quinto’s production company.

Other charter TypePad Motion sites include one for indie musician Ryan Star, who aggregates his Twitter and other feeds on his site, and the Canadian band Metric.