Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in March 2006, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In March 2006, Six Apart—then the dominant force in the blogosphere, home to TypePad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal—quietly Acquired by SplashBlogA mobile photo blogging app developed by SplashData for Palm devices. The press release paid attention to detail. Most observers presented it as “interesting, watch this space” and moved on.
But in retrospect, the redemption was a small, telling moment. Six Apart tried to own the entire line of content: create on your phone, publish on your blog, build your audience. They were reaching something the industry wouldn’t fully crack for another decade.
What Six Apart was actually being built
By 2006, Six Apart had collected an impressive portfolio. TypePad is powered by serious independent bloggers and media brands. Portable Type was a self-hosted CMS for publishers who wanted control. LiveJournal brought a large social audience. The company had real scale, real revenue and real ambitions.
SplashBlog fits a specific niche: mobile-first photo publishing. The Palm client was considered really good – clean interface, easy photo placement, decent note taking ability. While most “mobile blogging” involves emailing a blurry image to a hidden address and hoping it appears on your site, SplashBlog offered something closer to a real workflow.
Six Apart’s bet was that having this mobile landing would deepen the bond with TypePad users and extend their reach to a growing segment. It was a logical thesis. It came about five years too early for the hardware and networks to support it.
Why integration never happened
SplashBlog used to support multiple blogging platforms. When it was acquired by SplashData before the Six Apart deal, the app was updated to feature only SplashBlog’s own web service—a classic platform move to control relationships with users. Six Apart probably had something similar planned: deeper TypePad integration, exclusive features, tighter publishing cycle.
This did not happen on any meaningful scale. In 2006, the broader mobile internet was still limited to slow carrier networks, expensive data plans, and devices that were really hard to use to create persistent content. The already slowly declining Palm ecosystem would not be the launching pad for the mobile blogging revolution.
Six Apart itself has undergone restructuring over the years. In 2010, it split into two companies: SAY Media (which included advertising and media operations) and a restructured Six Apart focused on software. The blogging platforms it once maintained have been sold or taken down. TypePad still operates as a niche service today, but the empire is long gone.
The example we continue
What makes this purchase worth reconsidering isn’t the result—it’s the pattern. A dominant content platform is getting a promising tool that expands its reach into a growing channel. An integration is announced or implied. Then it stalls or quietly stalls or the market moves faster than the combined entity can.
Since then, we have watched this play many times. Twitter bought Vine in 2012 and shut it down in 2016 just as the short video was poised to explode. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo, then Verizon, then Automattic, each time with promises of renewed investment. Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, and they actually worked — but only because the mobile infrastructure finally caught up to the ambition.
The lesson is not that platform acquisition fails. Time and infrastructure are just as important as strategic logic. A good idea that is acquired too early or falls behind in integration tends to disappear rather than transform.
What this means for today’s content creators
For bloggers and independent publishers in 2026, the Six Apart–SplashBlog story is a useful framework for evaluating the tools you depend on. The question is not only “is this tool good?” not. but “who owns it, what are they building towards, and what if that vision changes?”
This is more relevant now than it was in 2006. The creative economy runs on a stack of third-party tools—newsletter platforms, scheduling apps, analytics dashboards, SEO suites, short-form video editors—many of which have been acquired, replaced, or defunct in recent years. ConvertKit became Kit. Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit. Buffer, Hootsuite, and similar tools have all gone through ownership changes and feature rationalization phases.
The instinct to diversify platform dependency—to own your email list, to host your own domain, to export your content—is partly a response to this very dynamic. The tools you use today may be absorbed into something else tomorrow, and the integration you hope for may never be delivered.
A longer view
Six Apart’s acquisition of SplashBlog was not a failure of vision. The vision was largely correct: mobile-first content creation would become the dominant method of publishing. They were simply working with an infrastructure within a company with its own structural pressures that could not yet support the idea.
Bloggers who understand this pattern—who keep their content portable, their audiences on channels they control, and workflows simple enough to survive tool changes—are better positioned for the next decade of platform disruption.
This is still the correct framework. Rather than being paranoid about every purchase, having a clear understanding that the tools that serve your creative work have their own business trajectories, and those trajectories don’t always parallel yours.
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