Ever since Ben and Mena Trott created Movable Type together so that Mena could blog and build a community, Six Apart has been about helping to get more people blogging. In order to do this we must produce optimized user experiences that take cutting edge technology and make it more accessible. We've been fortunate enough be recognized for our efforts in innovation and today we're introducing a free web application, Blog It for iPhone Powered by TypePad. Built specifically for iPhone's Safari browser, Blog It for iPhone enables you to post blog entries or status updates from wherever you are to more than a dozen different online services.
Blog It for iPhone is essentially the mobile version of our Blog It for Facebook application, which we launched in April. We've been thrilled with the response to Blog It for Facebook (see this ReadWriteWeb post for an example!), and love seeing people use it to create content and share it all over the web. And we also love making it better -- in May we added support for MarkDown so you don't need to write HTML by hand; and in June we added support for FriendFeed and Jaiku, to bring the total list of services we support to thirteen. Blog It now supports creating content on Blogger, Facebook, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad Vox, WordPress.com, and any WordPress.org site.
Blog It: Free blogging to any platform, from any iPhone
The Blog It for iPhone web application lets you post to your blog and update your status via one easy-to-use interface. Just like the original version for Facebook, you can choose to automatically share your post with people you know on various social networks. And Blog It for iPhone supports all the same services Blog It for Facebook does. To use Blog It for iPhone simply visit blogit.typepad.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
It's so easy that you don't even need to create yet another account; we've integrated OpenID for login to Blog It for iPhone. Our designers worked hard to try to keep it simple so that even if you don't know what OpenID is you'll still be able to just login with your account from Yahoo!. This also means that once you've chosen to link your accounts together, all of your existing settings from Blog It for Facebook will automatically show up on your iPhone and any changes you make will be reflected no matter where you use Blog It.
The Blog It for iPhone web application joins our existing iPhone-optimized TypePad site which we launched last year. TypePad bloggers can visit i.typepad.com from their iPhone to manage comment activity, create and publish simple blog posts and even check on site traffic statistics. To our beloved Movable Type users, we've heard you loud and clear: Blog It is a great way to post to Movable Type from your iPhone, or if you want even more features, you can check out the iMT plugin, which lets you manage your whole Movable Type blog from the device.
To round out blogging support for the iPhone, a native iPhone application for TypePad will be available for free at the launch of the iPhone App Store. TypePad for iPhone enables bloggers to instantly post photos from their iPhone to their blogs and photo albums on TypePad. Michael Sippey, Six Apart's VP of Products, demonstrated this new app during the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Check out the video of the event; his demo starts at about the 30 minute mark.
We're certainly excited about all of the great new things we can provide to bloggers because of the iPhone's great web browser and powerfully simple SDK for native applications. Below are some screenshots of the new free Blog It for iPhone web application, and you can access it from Safari on your iPhone at blogit.typepad.com.
