Announcing the TypePad Developer Program and TypePad Motion

Since our launch in 2001, Six Apart has created a rich array of social publishing applications like Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. Along the way, we have also developed and contributed to a number of open source technologies that are commonly used around the web today, including Memcached, Perlbal and OpenID.  Now we are taking another step forward opening the TypePad platform to developers.

We are very excited to introduce the new TypePad Developer Program - your gateway to the TypePad Cloud Platform – and the launch of TypePad Motion, a micro-blogging community application built in Python using the Django web-development framework.

TypePad Developer Program

We all know TypePad as an online blogging service reaching millions of people around the world. But over the past year, every aspect of TypePad has been revamped to improve the service from top to bottom. We’ve expanded TypePad to offer all of the social network features like profiles, friends, and status updates. At the same time we’ve done a lot of work under the hood to make it a platform on which to build social applications, in much the same way that SalesForce has opened its platform for the development of business applications.

This is a better way of building social web sites. In the same way that Six Apart made social publishing accessible to millions with our powerful blogging tools, commodity cloud services have helped lower the barrier of innovation in web services. We are building on that concept to make it easier to develop and scale the next generation of social applications.

The TypePad Developer Program will enable developers to build rich and flexible applications which interact with existing social networks and standalone sites. It provides access to open source libraries and sample code that we have developed to improve performance and scalability of web-based services. In addition, TypePad content (posts, comments, status updates, images, video, audio, links, etc) and social graph objects (users, profiles, groups, friends, following, etc) will be accessible through REST-ful APIs that connect applications to the TypePad Platform for infrastructure and data storage services.

TypePad Motion

We developed a new application powered by the TypePad platform that demonstrates the power of the TypePad APIs. TypePad Motion  is a micro-blogging community application for fostering on-line communities and is based on a lot of the ideas from Pownce, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2008.

TypePad Motion is written in Python using the Django web-development framework,making it extremely easy to build and customize. It’s a great example how developers can use TypePad on the back-end to do much of the heavy lifting but use an entirely separate presentation layer, like Django, to generate the front end templates and pages.

TypePad Motion enables you to:

• Create your own social network where members can form meaningful connections
• Grow rich and vibrant social communities and share notes, links, photos, videos and audio clips
• Get everyone to quickly join the conversation with support for sign-in credentials from TypePad, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo!
• Build and control your brand by turning your site into a social media hub
• Increase traffic and virality when members cross-post content directly to Twitter and Facebook

We have setup a TypePad Motion demonstration site where developers can check out the latest features and interactive elements offered by TypePad Motion.  In addition, here are some recent Six Apart clients who have installed TypePad Motion:

• Zachary Quinto - Our favorite new Spock and Heroes action star Zachary Quinto recently augmented his existing web site built on Movable Type with the new TypePad Motion community application. Now his fans have a place to interact and exchange ideas, pictures, music and videos about their favorite action hero.
• Metric - An indie rock band originally hailing from Toronto, Metric integrated TypePad Motion into their existing site so they could stay in touch with their fans and aggregate their social activity across the web back onto their site.
• Ryan Star - Singer-songwriter and musician, Ryan Star's Motion Community keeps him in touch with his fans, and his fans with each other as they follow Ryan's many performances across the country.

If you’re not a developer but would still like to setup and integrate your own TypePad Motion community, contact our Sales Team and we’ll be happy to get you set up quickly. For more information, please visit the TypePad Motion page.

If you are a Developer, get started today!

We are very excited about the new TypePad Developer Program, the launch of TypePad Motion and opening the TypePad Cloud Platform to all developers. The TypePad Developer Program is currently in Beta, so not all the features and functionality of TypePad are exposed or accessible yet. However, it was important for us to connect early and often with our developer community so that we could get feedback on how to improve TypePad, TypePad Motion and the TypePad platform. When you’re ready:

1. Download Motion
2. Get an API key
3. Learn about the TypePad APIs

And start your own social app!

Comments

[Vicki Welsh]

Can you please provide an update on your progress toward fixing the comment reply function? Is someone even working on it?

[Nima Badiey]

Hi Vicki

Can you please elaborate. Which application are you referring to: Comments TypePad blogs or comments on TypePad Motion?
-Nima

[Vicki Welsh]

Im talking about comments on the blog.Vicki WelshVirginiaMy blog: vickiwelsh.comMy shop: vickiwelsh.etsy.com

[Carol Wilkerson]

And, while we're at it, where is the compose button so I can post to my blog Pentimento? http://mywebduck.typepad.com/pentimento/

[Midori]

What's up with the comment reply function? I can't edit my comments, I can't even delete my own comments. I delete them from the list of comments and they still turn up on the blog any way. Not a happy camper.

[Robin]

Someone left a comment to my most recent blog post and it didn't show up in my email. What's up with that??

[Mark Simmons]

Hello, Robin.

I've opened a ticket with our team on your behalf. You should be receiving an email shortly. We'll investigate the situation.

Best,
Mark

[Mark Simmons]

Hello, Midori.

That definitely sounds like a problem but I think we'll need to need a little more information to troubleshoot.

I've opened a ticket with our team on your behalf. You should be receiving an email shortly to get the necessary information.

Best,
Mark

[Mark Simmons]

Hello, Vicki. We are still working on it. We released some fixes on Friday that should have helped.

As you know, the reply-to email now posts directly to the blog. But we've been working on making it easier for you to reply directly to the commenter. The latest improvements are for web-based mail programs like Yahoo and Gmail and allow you to click on the commenters email address to pull up an email with a pre-filled address and subject line.

We're still listening to all of the feedback about comments and emails and making improvements.

[Innovation strategy]

In my opinion, it's a very innovative idea to reach for developers out there to help your team improve the software. It can give you great success more rapidly.

[Vicki Welsh]

I get it. I know that the recent releases are for something else but I am not interested in NEW things until you fix the comments. I still contend that you should put it back the way it was and set the option to be commenting to the blog. I cant tell you how angry this one change has made me. It was poorly though out and even more poorly executed. It deserves priority attention and its not getting it. This has taken far too long to fix and you should be providing regular and public updates on the status. I know from reading comments that I am not the only person impacted by this.
Vicki WelshVirginiaMy blog: vickiwelsh.comMy shop: vickiwelsh.etsy.com

[Alexandria, Professional Bagpiper AFM Local 349]

You guys are making some wonderful changes! Great work!

[Nima Badiey]

If you didn't get a chance to fly to London for Ed and Mike's presentation, the slides are now posted here:

http://www.slideshare.net/edanuff/typepad-platform-fowa-london-2009