Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! has teamed with Six Apart, creator of Movable Type, the most popular software used to generate professional blogs. The announcement made on Sunday asserted that Yahoo! is now the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.
Yahoo! also made headlines on Friday, December 9th, when it acquired Del.icio.us, a site that allows users to share their favorite Web links with each other. Earlier this year Yahoo! acquired Flickr, a service that allows users to share photos with others.
This recent chain of activity by Yahoo! is evidence that the Internet giant is continuing in its quest to dominate “social media,” which is essentially constituted of sites that facilitate the sharing of written text, videos, and photos amongst Web users.
“With tens of millions of existing blogs and an estimated 70 thousand new blogs being created everyday, Yahoo! is committed to meeting the needs of the growing blogosphere, by helping bloggers focus on their content and their audience, rather than on their infrastructure,” said Rich Riley, vice president and general manager of Yahoo! small business.
Yahoo! already has a small business Web-site management service. With this new partnership, Yahoo! will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type software along with blogging tools, a unique Web address, and business-class e-mail services that include spam and virus protection and offers 200 e-mail addresses based on the business’s domain name. Users of this hosting service will be able to create a virtually unlimited number of blogs, with up to 200GB worth of data transfer per month along with 5GB of space for posts and pictures. The entire Web hosting service starts at $11.95 per month.
Moveable Type has its own unique interface and allows a user to create any number of blogs that might be for a particular workgroup or for individual people in a company. Six Apart says that it has catered Moveable Type to work seamlessly with Yahoo!’s hosting environment, and claims that blogs created by Yahoo! users will work twice as fast as its own hosting environment.
Six Apart, a privately held company, continues to work on versions of Movable Type that will work well for larger businesses. They continue to run Live Journal and TypePad, blogging services geared towards individuals.
Sources:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/12/
technology/yahoo_blogs.reut/
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/
article.php/3570386
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/81283/
yahoo-adds-blogging-to-small-
business-offering.html
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