SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad last night, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.
The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here's a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.
SixApart is a leading company in the field of social graph experimentation and the most outspoken participating company willing to be critical of some of Google's efforts like OpenSocial. BlogIt is interesting beyond its basic functionality because it can tie together confirmed accounts on Facebook, outside blogs and Twitter - then place that information in the hands of a company dedicating significant time and resources to leveraging such information in the interests of users. BlogIt may be just a beachhead landed in the hostile territory not of Facebook, but of online identity chaos in general.
Continued below.
Many people want to know when 3rd party RSS feeds will be able to be ported into the Facebook Newsfeed, something the company has been hesitant to allow but put its toe in this week (see Sarah Perez's dismissal and some commenters disagreeing at Facebook's Lifestream: Nothing to See Here).
Typepad's BlogIt won't post Twitter messages to your Newsfeed, but it will post blog post links there. It effectively automates sharing your blog posts off-site with your friends on Facebook. That's a big deal. The Facebook Newsfeed is the RSS reader of choice for millions of people - they just couldn't subscribe to RSS feeds in it! BlogIt is another crack in that wall.
SixApart was an early participant in Facebook's highly controversial Beacon project. Beacon broadcasts user activity on 3rd party partner sites to their friends' Newsfeeds on Facebook. Almost all of the partners were e-commerce sites broadcasting purchasing activity and it was extremely unclear whether the program was opt-in or opt-out. SixApart negotiated with Facebook to make their implementation of Beacon entirely and clearly opt-in.
Now that almost any blog post, not just those on SixApart platforms, can appear in Newsfeeds - many savvy bloggers may do their composition inside BlogIt so that their posts can gain the additional promotion to their Facebook friends. This will increase the visibility of best-practices (opt-in) in broadcasting off-site information in the Newsfeed - that's just the kind of visibility that Beacon needs.
Make no mistake, Beacon is still very important to Facebook. Though the company made a very public move in apologizing for the opt-out nature of Beacon, CEO Mark Zuckerberg still considers user purchasing activity to be the best form of advertisement the social network can display and thus key to the company's monetization strategy. If Facebook can follow SixApart's lead in the way it handles permission to display off-site activity, and if BlogIt leads to a proliferation of off-site blog posts displayed in Newsfeeds then Beacon-type Newsfeed notifications could become much more palatable to Facebook users.
This week's inclusion of user activity from Flickr, Yelp, Picassa and Del.icio.us into the Newsfeed is a move in a similar direction - but blog posts written by your friends are likely to have a higher click-through rate than less frequently uploaded photos, reviews for random restaurants and URLs being saved primarily for later personal reference. Getting personal blog posts into the Newsfeed is more valuable for all parties involved than any of the first 3rd party feed steps Facebook has taken.
Maybe the thoughts above are crazy, but I don't think so.
The BlogIt interface is far less sophisticated than native blogging platforms, but many bloggers will appreciate the ability to post to their blogs, Facebook and Twitter at the same time. On one hand this could end up being just another Facebook app, the vast majority of which probably weren't worth the time they took to create. On the other hand, BlogIt could be a small wedge into a series of game changing moves in social media.
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While I think it's a wonderful forward step in allowing users to further converge their online usage into a single place/login as well as ease them into "one place to post them all" functionality I don't see it as a positive on the whole.
Posted by: Chris O'Rourke | April 16, 2008 11:08 AMThis seems like another step in facebook becoming "the internet" the same way many users saw myspace 3 years ago. I just see the amazing amount of apps on facebook blurring in some users minds as being provided by facebook and not as a reflection of the greater internet (in other words Facebook/myspace equate to internet light).
I have to disagree. BlogIt doesn't support tags or categories; the post editor is spartan without even basic quicktag or autosave functionality, and the ability to post links to your feed only works for blog entries posted using BlogIt. As I explain in more detail in my review of BlogIt at metaBLOG, BlogIt needs to be able to pull in the RSS feed from all your blog accounts, not just its own authored posts, for it to be a killer app.
Posted by: Aziz Poonawalla | April 16, 2008 11:12 AMas a follow-up, note that there was an excellent Facebook app called BlogFriends which did allow importing of your blog's RSS feeds into your mini-feed. They went defunct because of a lack of resources, but it was an excellent tool while it lasted. In theory, BlogIt could replicate that functionality. I argue that an acquisition of BlogFriends by SixApart for inclusion into BlogIt would be a master move.
Still, even if BlogIt could post RSS feeds from the blog into the minifeed, they really need to improve the user interface. The lack of category and tag support is just ridiculous. Especially categories, which are supported by the metaweblog API.
Posted by: Aziz Poonawalla | April 16, 2008 11:18 AMWhile the article throws some interesting ideas, I don't think it will reach there. There are just too many social n/w apps out there. And more will come.
Posted by: Des | April 16, 2008 11:22 AM-D
My tech Blog
With MessageDance, you can post a blog entry to WordPress and Blogger blogs from your Facebook Inbox (Compose Message). You can do tags / labels / categories as well. You just need to have a MessageDance account (with your blog details configured), add MessageDance as an app, and then send your post to "blog @ messagedance.com".
Posted by: Geoff | April 16, 2008 11:25 AMI just see the amazing amount of apps on facebook blurring in some users minds as being provided by facebook and not as a reflection of the greater internet (in other words Facebook/myspace equate to internet light).
Posted by: prefabrik | April 16, 2008 11:26 AMAgreed with on Facebook blurring in some users minds. It's the modern AOL. FB has a lot of apps, but really limits to what you can do if the app is a standalone. I think it's a great place to bring attention and awareness to your product.
DemoPit
Posted by: John | April 16, 2008 11:42 AM@Aziz, we don't disagree with anything that you've said! Blog It does need to grow from a feature perspective as a blogging client, but today I do think it offers something really compelling around making blogging more social. Agreed on needing a profile box, which is on the roadmap. I've had your post open for a few hours, just getting around to commenting on it.
@Des, Blog It isn't trying to compete with the current breed of applications you see within social networks. We're instead looking at how we can make blogging better -- and more social -- for everyone, not just people who use Six Apart's tools. Definitely look for more things coming around how Blog It helps to get the word out about your new posts.
Thanks Marshall, and everyone commenting, to take the time to write about Blog It! We're certainly listening to and incorporating all the feedback.
Posted by: David Recordon | April 16, 2008 12:01 PMI really don't see the big deal here. I've been able to have my WordPress blog posts announced on my mini-feed, announced on twitter and sucked into friendfeed.com for a while now. Why would I want to give up the control that my blog allows me and start blogging in FaceBook?
=C=
Posted by: Cal Evans | April 16, 2008 12:41 PMDavid, I look forward to your comments. I am glad that you folks at SixApart are so responsive.
Posted by: Aziz Poonawalla | April 16, 2008 1:42 PMDid I miss something? Isn't this what Friendfeed does? I'm able to show my personal Wordpress blog's posts in my Facebook profile just fine.
And yes, it is totally lame that this isnt done by Facebook already!
Posted by: Saumil | April 16, 2008 2:19 PM@Saumil, FriendFeed seems to be more focused on consuming and aggregating what you're doing around the web. Blog It looks at the other side of the equation, creating content within a social network and publishing it to your blog(s), Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce.
Posted by: David Recordon | April 16, 2008 3:37 PMSo, this is sort of like the opposite of FriendFeed, and will cause duplicate posts on FreindFeed. FriendFeed will also need to start accounting for feedback loops that could occur because of apps like this. One post has the potential to create up to 8 or so FriendFeed duplicate posts.
I think there is going to have to be some sort of agreed meta tag that is posted with each of these services that aggregators like FriendFeed can look at that says "re-syndicate ok" or "do not re-syndicate" or maybe "re-syndicate [number] times" that re-syndicator can subtract 1 from once then re-syndicate. It is getting messy, but fun. Maybe not so fun for the average user, though.
Posted by: Nick Dynice | April 16, 2008 4:25 PM
Posted by: Snipsr | April 16, 2008 5:44 PMSnipsr has had his functionality for some time now. Snipsr is an installation-less javascript utility that enables you to clip and comment on (and from) any webpage and automatically post your comments to Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Hi5 etc in a single click.
A view too optimistic... :-)
Posted by: Blogsyncr | April 16, 2008 9:20 PMDavid, I think you are confusing profile boxes on facebook with the news feed. An app that pulls in your external blogs to a profile box is nothing new, there are numerous apps that do that already. What I am asking for is that BlogIt posts items from your external blog to your news feed. Right now blogit only posts items to the news feed tha are authored within blogit, but it needs to be able to do teh same thing for any blog post you write. See my comment in reply to yours for more detail.
Posted by: Aziz Poonawalla | April 17, 2008 6:15 AMI use an application called My Blogs which imports RSS feeds to my news feed and a profile box shows my latest 5 blog posts. Then I use Twitterfeed to post my new blog entries to Twitter. (Although since starting FriendFeed, I allow that to make the announcements on the news feed but still display the My Blogs profile box.)
This may be two services, but signing up to each was easy, My Blogs just being a FB app and Twitterfeed using OpenId, and they do the job of BlogIt without me having to turn to a cut down editor with no categories or tags, let alone any of the more advanced tools, to post to my blog.
BlogIt has a long way to go in my opinion.
Posted by: Phil Nash | April 18, 2008 1:01 AMHi Mike. This application is kind of cool, but for hard-core bloggers I don't see them switching to Facebook to do their blogging.
My immediate turnoff was the lack of support for placing images into your post. Without this function, I think BlogIt is pretty weak. On top of this, there is no support for rich text formatting other than adding your own HTML and who wants to do that?
Posted by: Brian Brown | April 18, 2008 9:21 AMhey thanks for sharing good job keep it up
Posted by: prefabrik evler | April 24, 2008 1:05 PM