Typepad Sucks

Me: NO IT DOESN'T

Reader: So why is that the title of your post jackass?

Me:  I want people looking for "Typepad sucks" to find out that they don't suck.

The other day I wrote that I hated Typepad due to some frustration with their new features.  How spoiled am I?  They give me double the storage and double the bandwidth and I'm complaining about how it's hard to do something that the new features weren't really designed for.  I've already deleted that post but it must have caught someone's eye.

The product manager at Typepad emailed me and was like:  "I heard you are having issues, get at me dog."  He didn't say it like that but that's how I thought of the email in my mind.  Receiving an unsolicited email from a product manager about a complaint is unheard of.  My brain could almost not comprehend it.  Was this a company that actually cares what the lowly customer actually thinks?  Can you imagine getting an email from a company's product manager saying they heard you'd had a complaint and we're curious if they could make it better?  He even apologized about the unsolicited email.  Good manners and everything...  Wow.

So I emailed him back and suggested we chat over IM due to the nature of my complaint.  He writes me back and we have a discussion on IM.  All of a sudden there is a human on the other end of the line.  This was not elevator music and some annoying woman's voice saying they value your call.   This was a person trying to make his product better by initiating contact with me.

I tell him my problem, he adds it to the list of things to do and says they'll try to make it better.  I tell him about other complaints and he tells me they've already fixed a bunch of them.  I also tell him a thing or two he didn't know and he plans on looking into them.  I ask him about transparency and he suggests they're trying to become more transparent with the stuff they're working on.

You might think this isn't feasible to do with bigger companies and you're probably right.  Then again Typepad isn't exactly small either.  How many times have you been asked for your input from the product manager of a company?  Probably never...

I don't want to tell you how the product manager found me because I don't want his feed(s) to lose value by people trying to chime in.  If you're a tech nerd you'll know how he found my post.  The point is, they're listening very well.  THEY GET IT!  They understand that blogs are not just about publishing, but rather they're also about listening.

So.

Typepad doesn't suck.

In fact it's pretty sweet.

It's great for lazy nerds like me who don't want to write a whole bunch of code or design a site from scratch.  I'd install Movable Type or WordPress on my own server but then why bother?  Just use Typepad!

business customerservice Typepad

Comments

[Lish]

Wow, that's great to hear! Anytime I've had an issue, typepad's been pretty good about helping me resolve it in a timely fashion.
On a side note- Did you discuss the fact that they use the amazon program to profit off their bloggers?

[Lee LeFever]

Good stuff Duncan. I'm glad to hear they are listening like that. It's the way of the future. :)

[Markus Sandy]

No, I'm afraid your first impression was the correct one. They do suck.

Performance is a real problem. Features are not exactly "web 2.0" or competitive with other blog platforms (IMHO).

Also, we should all get paid (or refunds) for the amount of debugging help required (this is a paid service after all). This most recent upgrade was a disaster. They promised a two hour change over and it's now been several days and I still have two open and unresolved tickets.

One is the inability to delete trackbacks (SPAM in this case). There are also formatting issues. By performance issues, I mean it can take five minutes to save a page (using broadband!).

The new WordPress importer for TP/MT should help a little.

Many hosting services now offer WordPress, far more bandwidth and storage for $6.95 a month. Plus you get all kinds of other apps like forums, CRM, project management, wiki, CMS, etc. That beats TP by a long shot.

The last time I reported a performance problem to them (for my tiny little blog), they tried to sell me on moving to MT several times before anyone actually got around to addressing the real issue.

Even Anil Dash came by with a lame explanation (and wrong according to TP Support Team) and tried to pitch me on moving to MT instead of actually trying to help.

Some how I don't think that an amount of IM'ing is going to solve these kinds of problems.

[Duncan]

hmm

I hear what you're saying about the lack of web 2.0ness

There have been some performance issues hasn't there...

Although I use Ecto to post, I do know the delay you're talking about.

I'm able to delete trackbacks in my account quite easily so maybe thats a new thing since you left.

Maybe I don't know enough about competing services?

Also, typepad isn't for everyone. I think it's designed for those of us who want more than something like blogger but less than their own server/domain/MT/WP etc...

I'm just happy they're listening.

[Duncan]

oh and no i didn't ask about how they insert their affiliate id into amazon stuff without asking...

[Sean]

duncan - i have nowhere else to post this, so i'm asking here - does using Ecto, with the tags at the bottom of each post, make trackbacks irrelevant? or no, because it's just a link to other topics, not continuations of a particular topic......

late night pondering for nerds...

[Duncan]

it doesn't affect the trackbacks

[Anil]

"oh and no i didn't ask about how they insert their affiliate id into amazon stuff without asking..."

You can use your own amazon affiliate code by entering it into your profile in the control panel.

[Duncan]

hey anil

i've changed the affiliate link to my own...

lish and i we're talking about another conversation we had on her blog about how she was shocked to find out that typepad was doing that without telling her...

[Jacqueline]

Yeah, TypePad customer support ROCKS.