TypePad Connect

At Six Apart we've been working furiously all year to move TypePad to a new platform (the one we built for Vox). The migration was a huge effort and cost us much blood, sweat, toil, and tears, but as we enter the final stages we are starting to bear the fruits this labor. We've been working to improve the core capability of TypePad in many fundamental ways, but one big way is the commenting and community management capability.

That's why I was so excited by the TypePad Connect launch. David Recordon did a great summary post of the news but the basics are that in one day, we launched essentially three things: (1) we overhauled TypeKey and turned it into TypePad profiles.
(2) we launched in beta a new commenting system for TypePad. It's awesome and has a beautiful new design and user interface.
(3) we realize that many folks, like me, have non-TypePad blogs as well as their TypePad blogs (and I'm been informed that in some sad cases there are people who don't even use TypePad at all). So we created TypePad Connect, an easy way to bring TypePad powered comments and profiles to a non-TypePad web site or blog.

So now when you comment on THIS blog (which is powered by Movable Type), your comments and profiles will be powered by TypePad. From my point of view I can manage comments and commenters on my MT and TP blogs in one place, and have the same anti-spam protection.

And a really cool feature: when you create a TypePad profile and view it on *my* R21 blog, it's actually part of *my* blog - served on a page from my MT powered R21 site, with the same styling as my blog. This means my community feels like mine. This is a cool feature that I've only seen provided by TypePad Connect.

This is part of several larger trends from Six Apart. First, dramatic improvements to the TypePad service. The beta commenting service is just one of many steps we are taking to improve TypePad. The second is continuing the Six Apart effort to bring more social capabilities to blogging, as we did with Vox and Movable Type Pro. We now have a commenting and profile system that can go virtualy everywhere. The third is evolving what TypePad actually is as a service. With TypeKey (now TypePad profiles), TypePad AntiSpam, TypePad Blog It, TypePad Blog Link, and now TypePad Connect, the blog service known as TypePad has become a service that can support virtually any blogger, regardless of what their main blogging platform is. This is a way of breaking down walls, and I liked how ReadWriteWeb covered TPC:

Embracing the concept of community that has the ability to exist and live outside the walls of a given blog or proprietary product is definitely a step in the right direction. (For that matter, it doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see the value of having a TypePad Connect profile as the endpoint for an OpenID URL.) TypePad Connect could be another step toward the realization of a truly distributed social Web.

The world of blogging is getting much more complicated, but, for my money, also much more interesting!

A huge thank you to Brad Whitaker and everyone who worked on this project -- you all did a fantastic job!