November Leftovers
Where did the month go? This post is a quick summary highlights some of the many noteworthy happenings of the past month in the world of Six Apart and web applications in general.
The biggest news wasn't even in November. Six Apart officially launched Vox, Six Apart's new blogging tool with social networking features and privacy controls, which was heavily covered in the press and praised by many throughout the month of November. Here is one such article from the MIT Technology Review.
Co-Founder Mena Trott was busy with the press talking up the company's new product and the vision behind it. The Economist profiled her in The Universal Diarist. She was also interviewed by MarketWatch (a former The Appnel Group client) blogger, Bambi Francisco.
While Vox is not anything we'd be offering services around or that business users would find much use in, it does provide a glimpse of where blogging tools are heading. Vox is about "intimate" media of using blogging to communicate with your group of family and friends. With a bit of re-factoring these same tools could be applied to business use and "confidential" media that is common in the enterprise.
There was plenty of news for the enterprise also. Coming on the heels of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 the month before, the company along with its partners SocialText and NewsGator amongst others announced Suite Two at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Suite Two is a bundling of Enterprise weblog, wiki and syndication tools along with support services on a Intel powered server from Dell or NEC.
The companies will be offering be integrating their offerings to include a single sign in facilities and a dashboard view of content across all the systems. It too was heavily covered in the industry press including this article from Information Week.
The suite won't be available until the first quarter of next year so details are a bit vague. Some early screenshots from the Suite Two integration have been released.
While its too early to judge, I think this is a good step in the right direction I would have preferred Six Apart to offer just their Enterprise tool pre-loaded on a server before taking on the challenges of bundling and integrating with other vendors like this.
Six Apart held a Blogging Business Seminar in San Francisco on the 13th of the month followed by a ProNet Hackathon the following day in the office. We were happy to been able to attend both.
At the seminar Six Apart laid out its current roadmap for Movable Type stating it will deliver version 3.5 in Q1 of 2007 and will follow-up with version 4.0 in Q3.
Much of what is in store for version 3.5 (code name "wheeljack") has been appearing in Six Apart's code repository. MT developer Arvind Satyanarayan has made posts previewing roles and groups, blog cloning and interface enhancements that have already made their way into the enterprise product in addition to assets management. Also announced was a new import/export tool based on the Atom Syndication Format with some extensions.
Version 4.0 will feature a new interface and advanced database features such as caching and partioning that comes from their work on TypePad and Vox.
Six Apart also announced their intention to release a new spinoff product call MT-Publisher. An approximate release date was not disclosed and details were some what vague. This tool will be more of a traditional content management tool built on MT's easy to use interface and framework. Features listed included a profile history, enhanced template management and workflow capabilities, podcast integration and advanced statistics.
For the more technically inclined Six Apart announced the Open Media Profile which merges Atom, Open Search and Yahoo's Media extensions to enable users to "search and find content to blog about from all over the Internet." DeWitt Clinton, author of the OpenSearch specification, blogs about it here.
Also of particular note to publishing tools everywhere was the announcement that Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed to join Google in their support of their Sitemap Protocol. According to the protocol's official site "Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling." Traditionally search engine have crawled pages and tried to discover links to new content in addition to discovering updates to what they had already indexed. The Sitemaps protocol provides guidance to these search engine crawlers to what is available and how often it should check back.
Phew -- that was a lot. Hopefully thing will slow down for the holidays so we can digest all of this activity.
