(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Blogging software and services provider Six Apart (www.sixapart.com) is opening up its TypePad platform (www.typepad.com) to developers, who will be able to make use of TypePad’s smart cloud and API to create new social applications. The first social app built on the platform, TypePad Motion (typepad.com/go/motion), has also been released to the open source community, offering organizations and individuals start their own micro-blogging communities.
TypePad Platform Rebuilt and Open for Development
At this week’s Future of Web Apps conference in London, Six Apart announced it has rebuilt the TypePad platform from the ground up over the past year, introducing social networking features such as profiles, followers, micro-blogging, and status updates to its members. Organizations can run these social apps, leaving the storage, infrastructure and organization of social graph data and social objects to the TypePad cloud.
The improvements also let developers now build social apps using 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. It is already being used by rock band Metric (frontrow.ilovemetric.com) as a way to interact with fans.
“We’ve been experimenting with TypePad Motion with some of our artists and are tremendously excited about the results and creative possibilities,” EMI music marketing platforms vice president Eric Case said in a statement. “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.”
Six Apart’s TypePad Developer Program (developer.typepad.com) provides developers a developer preview of the TypePad API. The open-source application TypePad Motion can easily be adapted for other social apps, according to the company.
Pownce Gets New Life as TypePad Motion
Six Apart is also open sourcing TypePad Motion, which is derived from the Pownce code base, which Six Apart bought in 2008. Motion provides the basis for a Twitter-like micro-blogging community, but it also provides developers a reference as they build other social apps on the TypePad platform. TypePad Motion is written in Python using the Django framework.
Kevin Rose, who founded Digg and Pownce said, “I’m excited to see that Six Apart’s developer program is opening up a smart new way to build social apps,” said “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.”
While social networking applications like Twitter and Facebook tend to thrive on aggregating large numbers of people, Six Apart is giving developers the power to create similar communities, but ones that will be more focused. And while the TypePad platform gives website owners the opportunity to run their own independently branded social applications, they will also be able to easily integrate other TypePad-supported sites through an easy cloud login using their Facebook, Twitter, TypePad, or OpenID logins.
“We believe this is a better way of building social web sites,” Six Apart chief executive officer and chairman Chris Alden said in a statement. “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.”
