Six Apart Bridging The Gap

While I was attending WordCamp Columbus, I was also monitoring what was going on at WordCamp Mid Atlantic when I was shocked to find out Anil Dash, CEO of Six Apart provided the keynote for the event. The premise of the keynote was that Six Apart would be creating plugins which could be used on WordPress that would tap into their services such as TypePad Anti Spam, TypePad Connect, etc. Shashi Bellamkonda of NetworkSolutions did a great job pulling Anil aside to have a video interview with him to talk about this announcement.

By the way, if you want to see Anil Dash delivering the keynote, check out Isteconnects.org.

I commend Anil Dash for delivering this news first hand to a grass roots event centered around his competition. I wonder if he had butterflies in his stomach prior to the presentation or if he was juiced up with adrenalin? At any rate, my first reaction to this was WTF. But after taking a closer look and breathing some fresh air, I think this is a great business move by Six Apart. While to some, the notion of a company providing support for their competition is not new, to hardcore fans of WordPress, this could be seen as a shocker. In the end however, end users receive the most benefit. Now, WordPress users can tap into certain Six Apart services they deem to be superior than that offered elsewhere. At the same time, Six Apart now opens their doors to a huge audience. If I were in Six Apart’s position, I would have done the same thing.

Now, does Automattic have anything to offer to MovableType Users? If not, is it even in Automattic’s best interest to provide anything to MT users? One thing I would like to mention because it’s not clearly stated on the Six Apart plugin page:

The TypePad AntiSpam plugin for WordPress is open source and is licensed under the GPLv2.

Before I let you go, I just realized that Automattic has IntenseDebate, Gravatar, and PollDaddy to offer to not only users of MovableType/TypePad, but for any platform that supports embedding within content.

So what are your thoughts on this move by Six Apart?