Great things coming out of Six Apart

You may or may not know that this blog uses Movabletype (wiki) behind the scenes to make everything work. I've been extremely happy with the software ever since I first used it in July of last year, and recent developments have only made things that much better. Six Apart recently created an application for Facebook (normal people who are not Facebook call these things plug-ins) that allows you to write and publish blog posts from your Facebook account/page to a huge number of services and platforms. I see the aging WordPress is present, as is Blogger, Twitter, any MT site, along with some others.

Wired/Compiler's Scott Gilbertson thinks this is more than just a nifty application.

But while Blog It may be a work in progress, even in limited form, it's the easiest way I've seen to broadcast posts across platforms. It offers the ability to pick and choose which posts go where on a per-post basis so you're always in control of who sees what. Every time you add a new service to update, Blog It offers the option to automatically post to that service, though you can always uncheck any of the services when you actually post something.

Six Apart stagnated there for a while but has thrown off the rust and resumed pioneering ways to communicate with other people. There's an open source version of MT4, which this site uses, community editions for social networking, and just today an announcement that 6A has bought a targeted ad network that it'll make available to sites of any size. Think of it as AdSense, but targeted so you only get advertisers selling things that your specific readers would be interested in.

These are significant steps in the continuing marginalization of WordPress as a hobby platform. I wonder if WP will even be around in significant numbers in 5-10 years?

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