Six Apart creates Tumblr-type microblog

[charmian]

elena informed me that Six Apart has released Typepad Micro, which is basically a Tumblr knock-off plus native commenting.

This is met with some snark: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/5807355462

An employee of Six Apart's main rival, Automattic, talks about it: http://terrychay.com/article/typepad-micro.shtml

"The biggest lesson learned from P2 is that if you are looking for “micro” style content, you must put a content add page in the reading page: just like Twitter, Tumblr, and P2 do." (P2 is a Wordpress 'microblog' style layout)

http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2009/11/typepad-goes-after-tumblr.html
An interesting assertion is made: eventually, users will demand reblogging EVERYWHERE, including in regular Typepad and Wordpress. Also some interesting comments on the "veil" of Tumblr; I have to say, you CANNOT understand Tumblr's appeal without going "behind the veil" and seeing it from the perspective of a logged in user.

It's an open question whether this will work: it's supposed to be free because the objective is to promote the Typepad platform. Yet, will people still want to pay for Typepad when they can use Wordpress.com for free? Or Tumblr for free? Do people who microblog even want to do regular type blogging and thus become Typepad customers? (I think what we're seeing is the casual/personal component of blogging basically leaving for microblogs and Twitter)

Anyway, I have a post brewing on Tumblr's discovery features and promotion. (BTW, how many of you use Tumblr?)

Comments

[matgb]

What do you mean by "couldn't get away with that"? It seems to me they still have quite a bit of the ex-LJ staff still working there.

Oh, absolutely, sorry--they seem to have a habit of buying companies with decent staff, shutting the product down, then putting those staff onto other pet projects. I'm not sure they realised just how vociferous the userbase on LJ would be, etc.

Really? How could they buy a company and not know what people use it for?

I have no clue, but either Mena was talking complete drivel whenever she was asked about LJ, or she really had no clue--we're all teenage girls talking about girlstuff, etc; no_lj_ads did a good job of documenting a lot of her sayings in the early days, it really was quite poor.

And when she was doing publicity for Vox, she was talking about the privacy options and similar as if it was a radically new idea that no one had ever done before. If your new product's main selling point is something a different product you have already does better, there's something wrong somewhere.