Bronte Media

API and open feeds are two Web 2.0 hype bingo words but behind them is a very simple concept: If you are too busy to do it yourself then at least have the courtesy to enable others to do it for you.

Typepad has long been lauded as a Web 2.0 stalwart but more and more I am convinced they are dead in the water. I use it for this blog but the service is excruciatingly slow. The interface is pretty and clean and simple but everything is strangely worded (what the hell is under a ‘configure’ tab? why call a custom section a Typelist? etc.).

As well as being strangely worded, the blog is just too hard to change and mash up. Like the servers being way too slow, so too is there feature development. It took about a year longer than it should have to support text ads via a partnership with Kanoodle in a deal that should have been signed in a week and gone live in January not November of 2004.

People want to integrate services but they have to go through the SixApart bureaucracy bottleneck (how many times can you apologize for being slow and state that you are growing too fast before you just look incompetent and stop growing at all?). Which brings me to Wordpress.

Wordpress is an open source blogging tool that is gaining a lot of traction. Besides one hiccup, they are doing extremely well. They are doing so because they enable and encourage people to extend their software. Insiderpages, a consumer-written yellow pages company, has come out with a plugin that allows bloggers to cross-post reviews to their blog and to their platform. I am sure Wordpress wasn’t their first choice but it is easy to do. Their emails and offers of help probably wait unanswered in the Six Apart inboxes. When folks like Google announce XML sitemap guides, hackers conjure up scripts to support them in Wordpress. Social bookmark sites make tagging easier with Wordpress. Again, I am sure they would love to make it easy for Sixapart products but they can’t.

Pierre Omidyar said in an interview, that I will vaguely allude to but not cite, that there was no grand scheme of community credibility when he introduced the feedback system for eBay, it was simply that he couldn’t answer and arbitrate on all the emails from buyers and sellers he was getting. He was too busy but at least he was courteous enough to allow others to do the work if they wanted to.

That seems pretty Common Sense 0.1 alpha, let alone Web 2.0. But I don’t have  a whole lot of faith that Typepad will integrate this basic form of common sense. After all, they are too busy and growing so fast. As for me, I will be stripping the post of irony and migrating the blog across to Wordpress in the near future, which because of my use of feedburner early and a few other things, shouldn’t be too hard.