Interop between blogging tools
I've been reading lots of reports about the current TypePad outage, but while the outage is still going on, I don't want to appear to interfere. I remember how awful it was to have popular bloggers jumping on my case when I last had a big outage.
Context & Ripple Effects
TypePad has been down for days, drawing widespread reports including The Register's blunt 'titsup' writeup, and Six Apart's December 16 update tried to steady users by assuring them that posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos and files have not been lost.
Dave Winer's post is a deliberate act of restraint inside that storm: his headline points at interop between blogging tools, but he declines to criticize while the outage is still running, recalling how awful it was when popular bloggers jumped on him during his own last big outage. That makes this less an attack than a window into how platform failures get adjudicated publicly by the people who build rival tools.
First-order effects
- Six Apart is fighting the outage on two fronts at once — restoring service while using its data-safety assurances as the main lever to keep paying TypePad users from bolting mid-outage.
- Winer withholding commentary while the outage runs removes one prominent rival voice from the pile-on, buying Six Apart a quieter news cycle than the one he himself endured.
Second-order effects
- Rival hosted-blogging platforms now have a live reliability contrast to market against, shifting the competitive battleground from features toward uptime and how a vendor communicates during failure.
- An extended outage hands ammunition to the interop argument in Winer's headline: users weighing a move start valuing export paths and cross-tool compatibility over any single host's promise of safety.
Third-order effects
- If multi-day outages keep recurring at hosted platforms, data portability and tool-to-tool interop harden from developer talking points into selection criteria that shape where mainstream bloggers host at all.
The trend: Recurring outages at hosted blogging services are pushing interoperability and data portability from technical ideal to a practical factor in platform choice.