The last 24 hours have been massively disappointing as a Typepad user. Let me be clear...the Six Apart team has been very open and apologetic about the issues at play. From the most recent update:
We want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost. Over the weekend we will be restoring any photos or files you uploaded over the past several days. We will be providing updates throughout the weekend to status.sixapart.com, and will post any major updates to Everything TypePad.
Sorry, not good enough. Keeping my data safe qualifies as the absolute MINIMUM required to KEEP me [and many others] as a customer. Throwing that back to us tonight was a very miscalculated "update."
Honestly, a full business day of inoperability simply isn't excused or obviated by an open apology. If my trader couldn't process trades for an hour much less a day; my firm would look elsewhere, perhaps permanently. A "sincere" apology wouldn't make a difference. If my ISP didn't function for a full day, a nice blog post wouldn't obviate the lost productivity and I would expect material compensation for my losses.
Here's the thing that Barak, Mena, Ben, Michael, Brad and everyone else need to understand...you are FAR too early and undifferentiated to rely on our loyalties time in, time out. I didn't host my blog on Typepad during the last round of outages, but I know MANY who were here and they largely vetted the Six Apart team to me by noting the sincere promise to make sure those issues NEVER AROSE AGAIN.
Six Apart is a very good service, it's why I chose to publish Ponderings on it...but it's not irreplaceable. In fact, blog publishing services are quickly becoming commoditized and it's going to be a race to keep ahead of the pack. It's mighty difficult to stay ahead of the pack when you're constantly putting out fires.
Now that the service is back online, the blogworld is starting to discuss this at large. Tech.meme has plenty of posts on the subject, Om Malik hits on the subject in a broader sense [i.e., the importance of scale and reliability for Web 2.0 ventures] and ZDNet gives the ugly history of Six Apart's recent growing pains.
This couldn't have come at a worse time for the Six Apart team, having just announced a major partnership with Yahoo! I've no idea whether Yahoo! has an out clause, but you can be sure there are some Yahoo! executives that are going to want an updated contingency and redundancy plan in place before they roll out the new SMB Blogging service.
I can't speak for other bloggers, but I don't want contrition, I don't want a 45-day credit, I don't want a graphically appealing traffic light telling me that the service is offline...I WANT MY BLOG TO WORK, AT FULL CAPABILITY, AT FIVE NINES RELIABILITY.
So odd they don't seem to have had any contingency strategy in place after the previous outage...
Anyway, your point about commoditization (sp?) is spot on. Blogspot-on. Granted, Blogger has become a steaming pit of spammy poo (or about 50% of it has) but I think in principle a separate service like TypePad doesn't have longevity as a business concept, even without the slip-ups.
It just makes more sense that free/cheap hosted blogs will end up on Yahoo, Google, etc, while the do-it-yourself crowd will self-host and use open software.
I think 6A (or at least their VC backers) know this and are thinking of a future in which they belong to Yahoo... which, as you noted, is a bit tricky when your tech falls down.
Meanwhile Yahoo has its own mixed history, with Flickr mostly still running well (good) and Oddpost having been effectively eviscerated to support their mistaken e-mail strategy (bad). Since Google didn't do very well with their blog acquisition, Yahoo can get a competitive upper hand there if they act fast *and* carefully.
If I were Yahoo and thinking about buying 6A, I'd throw some infrastructure at them first... basically put the Yahoo operations team behind TypePad for six months and see if they can make it stop breaking; if yes, acquire, if no pull out.
Pure speculation... ;-)
Posted by: frosty | December 17, 2005 at 04:13 PM