Fred Wilson has an interesting post positing that blogging platform companies like Six Apart/TypePad are the "future of websites". It's an interesting thought because it raises the question as to what these companies should be when they grow up.
These companies are increasingly competing with global portals like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, AOL, AskJeeves/Bloglines (owned by Interactive Corp.) that are offering:
- mainstream consumer blogging software.
- free and/or subscription driven hosting services.
- enhanced mechanisms to find, organize, search, read and share blogs.
In other words, the portals are catering to both the blogger and the blog-reader (blogee?), while the blogging platform companies are catering primarily to the "production and hosting" needs of the blogger, and to the relatively advanced blogger at that.
On the one hand, they cater to the millions of folks publishing blogs and in that context, they continuously need to provide a platform that can scale while providing the flexibility, ease of use and power features demanded by mainstream "newbie" bloggers and power bloggers alike.
And they need to do this as the medium of expression evolves from text only to audio, video and "ajax programming" driven blogging. Fred's example of including Google Maps in one's post is but a baby step in this direction.
On the other hand, there is an increasing pull to cater to the tens of million blog readers, who increasingly need better ways to
- cope with the flood of blogs streaming into their feed readers,
- search and find blogs posts that stream constantly vs. searching and finding relatively static web pages via search engines that periodically crawl the web,
- organize and book mark these web sites,
- share these conversations with others via tagging and other mechanisms.
John Battelle, in a recent interview with Yahoo!'s SVP in charge of Search and Marketplace, Jeff Weiner, noted:
"Weiner calls his vision FUSE (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand) and it's an apt metaphor - using search to fuse a myriad of services and applications, all of which center on knowledge and its application.
As Jeff pointed out to me, at the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me - search is not just about a web index. It's about my interface to the world."
The blogging platform companies certainly have a lot to fuse together, starting with a key decision on what they want to be when they grow up:
- provider of software infrastructure platforms for bloggers at every level of complexity.
- hosting of blogs.
- providing the FUSE functionality for blog readers.
- some of the above.
- all of the above.
Certainly, some of the pioneers in the space already recognize this challenge, with companies like Six Apart/Typepad having separate businesses that cater to the first two items in the list above respectively...the question is do they also need to provide number 3, or can they leave that to other providers/competitors?
Or do they just become a part of something bigger much like Geocities became a part of Yahoo! in an earlier era of internet commercialization?
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