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TypePad reaction

2 comments on TypePad reaction

TypePad reaction
: I held off reacting to TypePad because I was a beta tester and wore a gag of indeterminate duration.

Now that the product is released, I put some reaction — concentrating on constructive complaints — on my AOL test blog.

My TypePad test blog is here.

: UPDATE: Anil has left a lot of good answers to my quibbles in the comments. I forgot to mention the biggest advantage Movable Type and TypePad have over Blogger/Blogspot, AOL and others: responsiveness. Ben, Mena, and Anil listen to their customers. That’s why it’s worth throwing your two cents out here.

2 responses to “TypePad reaction”

  1. joy Avatar
    joy

    A couple of remarks about your criticism…
    1)If you want to enjoy MT but under your own hosting, then go for MT Pro (standalone). TypePad is designed to be an all in on deal.
    2)I agree with you about the lack of bandwidth, 3 GB is not nearly enough for the Pro version of TypePad.
    3)Anil has remarked on a friend’s blog that there will always be a free version of MT, aside from TypePad and MT Pro (standalone) development.

  2. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    Just wanted to throw in some quick answers to a lot of your concerns. First, sorry I missed telling you when you were free to review the service, the email went out to the beta testers list and it’s my fault you weren’t on that list.
    We don’t support FTP output in the current version because we found that any user who even knew what FTP is, let alone had their own server which enabled it, was interested in Movable Type and something they could control on their own server. There may be some middle ground, but TypePad’s largely aimed at people who don’t know or care what FTP, Perl, CGI, chmod, or any of that stuff is.
    The bandwidth concerns are legitimate for you, but I don’t think your traffic is typical of most weblogs, and we’re certainly open to seeing what makes sense for people’s transfer limits going forward.
    Your UI concerns I think reflect the fact that we designed around people using the tool every day, which is a balance against being a very bare interface designed for demos.
    The blogroll links ordering is our biggest request. That means we’ll be doing it ASAP, probably right after domain names.
    Glad to hear you like a lot about the service. I’d quibble about AOL being a better deal (AOL’s twice the price of the most expensive plan for TypePad, even if you don’t take advantage of any of our discounts. Basic users of TypePad are paying under $4 a month on average, which doesn’t even pay for AOL’s voice blogging add-on.) but I do think users are interested in pieces like blogrolling and stats and photo albums, which distinguishes TypePad a bit.
    Finally, we’re bringing large parts of our work on TypePad back into MT Pro, and we plan to put more info on that out as soon as possible. I’m pretty confident MT won’t be squeezed because we’ve got more business, educational, and political users than almost anybody, in addition to all the regular webloggers, and that’s more than enough to keep the product vibrant.