Competition is a good thing for end users. Innovations in key blog authoring tools had hit a slow patch. Things are beginning to look different now.
Today Six Apart announced TypePad AntiSpam plugin for both TypPad and Wordpress blogs. This is a great news and it should be welcomed for multiple reasons.
First of all it’s open source and that will help create necessary motivation to add innovation around this API.
Second good news is that it’s all free. Akismet charges subscription fee for commercial use. Free is good for many living-on-adsense bloggers.
At some time you would think TypePad and Akisment spam fighters can work together in a sort of federated Interpol for catching blog spams. Now that code is open source, I am sure some smart developer will attempt just that to reduce false positives.
TechCrunch has good things to say about this plugin.
Download TypePad AntiSpam plugin from here.
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I am jumping into comment related meme started by Fred Wilson. He made a well articulated case for using Disqus. He mentioned three reasons - Threaded discussion, Shared profile and email convenience. I completely agree on email feature. Its a big missing feature in existing blog conversation design.
Threaded discussion and shared profile features are rapidly losing their value. Shared profile feature management now belongs to big platforms. Facebook, Google and Myspace/Yahoo will manage this better. That will take punch out of reputation management as well.
Threaded discussions are not working mostly, just look at techmeme leaderboard. Most blogs don’t need that. Its a nice to have feature.
Secondly, third party comments don’t work well on mobile handsets. This is a big drawback as we get into more and more mobile experience. I increasingly use iPhone for all blog posts and comments.
Thirdly, and this one is big, Twitter and blog post based response models will finally take over. I will elabore more on the last one in next post. Twitter will disrupt commenting system as we know them.
Now back to tennis.
Update: Just read Don Dodge’s analysis. He mentioned performance concerns as one of the sticking point. I think that will be resolved in near future.
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