Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in March 2006, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In March 2006, Six Apart — then the reigning power in the blogosphere, home to TypePad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal — quietly acquired SplashBlog, a mobile photo-blogging app built by SplashData for Palm devices. The press release was thin on details. Most observers filed it under “interesting, watch this space” and moved on.
But looking back, the acquisition was a small, telling moment. Six Apart was trying to own the entire content pipeline: create on your phone, publish to your blog, build your audience. They were reaching for something the industry wouldn’t fully crack for another decade.
What Six Apart was actually building
By 2006, Six Apart had assembled an impressive portfolio. TypePad powered serious independent bloggers and media brands. Movable Type was the self-hosted CMS of choice for publishers who wanted control. LiveJournal brought in a massive social audience. The company had real scale, real revenue, and real ambition.
SplashBlog fit a specific gap: mobile-first photo publishing. The Palm client was genuinely well-regarded — clean interface, easy photo posting, decent note-writing capability. At a time when most “mobile blogging” meant emailing a blurry image to a secret address and hoping it appeared on your site, SplashBlog offered something closer to a real workflow.
Six Apart’s bet was that owning that mobile on-ramp would deepen the lock-in for TypePad users and extend their reach into a growing segment. It was a reasonable thesis. It just came about five years too early for the hardware and networks to support it.
Why the integration never materialized
SplashBlog had previously supported multiple blogging platforms. When it was acquired by SplashData before the Six Apart deal, the app was updated to point exclusively to SplashBlog’s own web service — a classic platform move to control the relationship with users. Six Apart presumably planned something similar: deeper TypePad integration, exclusive features, a tighter publishing loop.
It didn’t happen at any meaningful scale. The broader mobile web in 2006 was still constrained by slow carrier networks, expensive data plans, and devices that were genuinely difficult to use for sustained content creation. The Palm ecosystem, already in slow decline, wasn’t going to be the launchpad for a mobile blogging revolution.
Six Apart itself went through years of restructuring. In 2010, it split into two companies: SAY Media (which absorbed its advertising and media operations) and a reconstituted Six Apart focused on software. The blog platforms it once held were sold off or wound down. TypePad still operates today as a niche service, but the empire is long gone.
The pattern we keep seeing
What makes this acquisition worth revisiting isn’t the outcome — it’s the pattern. A dominant content platform acquires a promising tool that extends its reach into an emerging channel. The integration is announced or implied. Then it stalls, or gets quietly shelved, or the market moves faster than the combined entity can.
We’ve watched this play out repeatedly since. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 and shut it down in 2016 just as short video was about to explode. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo, then Verizon, then Automattic, each time with promises of renewed investment. Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, and those actually worked — but only because mobile infrastructure had finally caught up with the ambition.
The lesson isn’t that platform acquisitions fail. It’s that timing and infrastructure matter as much as the strategic logic. A good idea acquired too early, or dropped into an integration backlog, 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 frame for evaluating the tools you depend on. The question isn’t just “is this tool good?” but “who owns it, what are they building toward, and what happens if that vision changes?”
This is more urgent now than it was in 2006. The creator 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, pivoted, or sunset in recent years. ConvertKit became Kit. Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit. Buffer, Hootsuite, and similar tools have all gone through rounds of ownership change and feature rationalization.
The instinct to diversify platform dependency — to own your email list, maintain your own domain, keep your content exportable — is partly a response to exactly this dynamic. The tools you use today may be absorbed into something else tomorrow, and the integration you were counting on may never ship.
The longer view
Six Apart’s acquisition of SplashBlog wasn’t a failure of vision. The vision was largely correct: mobile-first content creation would become the dominant mode of publishing. They were just working with infrastructure that couldn’t support the idea yet, inside a company that had its own structural pressures.
The bloggers who understood that pattern — who kept their content portable, their audiences on channels they controlled, their workflows simple enough to survive tool changes — were better positioned for the decade of platform disruption that followed.
That’s still the right frame. Not paranoia about every acquisition, but a clear-eyed awareness that the tools serving your creative work have their own business trajectories, and those trajectories don’t always run parallel to yours.
