The Six Apart development team who created MoveableType and Typepad – two of the mega-platforms of web publishing – are not for sitting on the sidelines watching Twitter take all the glory. They’ve unveiled a series of technical upgrades that include micro-blogging tools, complete with the ability to ‘follow’ other people and profiles. The move […]
The Six Apart development team who created MoveableType and Typepad – two of the mega-platforms of web publishing – are not for sitting on the sidelines watching Twitter take all the glory. They’ve unveiled a series of technical upgrades that include micro-blogging tools, complete with the ability to ‘follow’ other people and profiles. The move indicates the mainstreaming of microblogging and how content management system providers are extending their toolkits.
A spokesperson said: “When we built the new TypePad, we wanted to help bloggers find each other faster – so we added a feature called “following” to the dashboard…. [because it’s] a great way to grow blog readership and to keep up with bloggers you like.”
The process is good for bloggers because it builds audiences and extends the reach of their content in ways similar to the massive increase in reach brought about by syndicating feeds into Facebook and other social media platforms. When one blogger ‘follows’ another, they can see their recent activity such as blog posts and comments. Following has become such an obsessive phenomenon that when one person starts following another, normally the act becomes reciprocal. If they leave a comment on the person’s blog, then all their followers will see it as well as readers of the blog – so the blog and its posts reach readers never previously connected.
The model that Twitter pioneered is being copied by many social media platforms so strategically the move could undermine some of the value proposition of Twitter
Links: More details from TypePad at Everything TypePad.
24/08/2009
