Is Typepad about to improve? I hope so.

A few weeks back, I commented that I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Typepad.  A few hours later, Six Apart's Mike Sippey who is in charge of the Typepad product,  pinged me and invited me to lunch. We got together yesterday, chatting for over two hours. 

After spending some time discussing, industry and personal niceties, I let loose with a 20-minute barrage of why I was considering a divorce fromTypepad. Fueled by excessive coffee and a frustrating morning, I was pretty aggressive.

Mike did what I think any company representative should do when confronting an upset customer: He listened. He really listened. He jotted notes, asked drill down questions, that got into specific details.

Mike told me that new human resources had been added to the Typepad team and in January users will start seeing a steady flow of extensive improvements just about everywhere in the product and its deteriorating support service. I agreed not to post specifics.

I believed what I heard. if it happens as he says, then I will likely find myself once again a happy customer. If I don't, then it's nice to know there are other options open to us end users.

Stay tuned.

Comments

[ted demopoulos]

I a bit annoyed with TypePad too!

I can't leave trackbacks to other TypePad blogs (including yours) and support gives me the runaround. They occasionally refuse to let me leave comments here and other places too.

Plenty of other options available, but not considering blogging divorce yet!

[sippey]

Shel -- thanks for the post; it was great getting together and talking about how we can make TypePad better, faster and stronger.

Ted -- we've been more aggressively recently in filtering TrackBacks because of spam; it may be that yours has been caught in the filter. I'll check out your help tickets and see what I can find out...

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Having to fill out letters and numbers everytime on Uncle Shel's blog is so annoying.

This is not the case for wordpress.

The sad thing is, sometimes I don't leave comments because of that small barrier to the conversation. I'm sure I'm not alone.

[David Dalka]

Trackback ability consistency, better spam protection, if you make it tighter, they will have less incentive to send it. Both Wordpress and Typepad need to do better at responding to these serious problems.

[Jeremiah Owyang]

I tried your 'search this blog' on right nav, and I'm not quite sure what it's doing. It doesn't appear to search red couch domain.

[Bernie Goldbach]

I wonder if Six Apart offer a high end enterprise support package for their business users. I've no complaint with Typepad even though I know my 3800-post blog has to be straining the support system.