The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

Fasten your seat belts

My dear, dearer and dearest Mo'people,

Some of you may be aware that Mo'time was born in the summer of 2003... you may remember eon, banzai, joe london, nakedandalive, alohalani, calgal, limine, pulp, joe schmuck and many others back in the very first weeks (am I forgetting anyone from the charter days??). Of course a lot of those people are miraculously still here. We piggy-backed Mo'time off of Splinder.com, the Italian version of the platform that is the market leader in the land of vespas and red-tiled roofs, just to see if it could survive on the international scene without any marketing or advertising support after the 500 bucks that we spent on a Google ad campaign.

And here you are, 3.5 years later still making this place a somehow unique corner of the Internet, sheltered from the storms that blow around the net from time to time.

Our idea has always been to take this as far as we could on our own, using the proceeds from our instant messaging technology to fund the blogging sites. When Murdoch bought MySpace and the buzzwords "social networking" and "web 2.0" were all the rage, our Italian blogging community caught the attention of the large media companies and the more successful Internet companies -- the ones that survived the bust.

Last week we actually signed the papers. Tipic, Inc. the creator and owner of Mo'time and Splinder was purchased by Dada S.p.A., a company specializing in digital communities, entertainment and content products for mobile devices. Read the press release here.

What does this mean for you?

For the immediate future, not much will change around here. Soon we will be able to finally offer you cool new templates for your blogs, creating a system to make browsing your blogs on cell phones easier, to post photos, videos and text directly from your cell phone to your blogs and other improvements.

Eventually, we may change the name of the platform, and the graphic look and feel will be evolved and improved along the way. However, the same people that created Mo'time, myself included, are staying right here! All I can tell you is that we are still dedicated to giving you the tools you need to do the stuff that you want to do. We want to make it easier to use while giving you more options.

It has been a long haul of lots and lots of very late nights, and dragging along our laptops everyday, rain or shine, on vacations, on weekends and, well, all the time! It pleases me to declare in no uncertain terms that we are really happy about this and convinced that our new managers share our ideals and plans for making Mo'time and Splinder grow. Of course, we will be looking at ways that this project can make money -- but we will be doing so without destroying the very atmosphere that allowed us to grow!

On a personal level, I have learned a lot from all of you and am amazed at the honesty and integrity that so many of your bring to this place. I'll haul out that old chestnut that I've learned a lot about myself, too, doing this work. So before I get all misty, I'll just sign out here. Thanks, everybody, I think we're really going to take this blogging thing up a few notches!!

posted by: howard at 00:34 | link | comments (33) |
news, blogosphere, thank you

Interesting news coming up

Something good happened. I'll tell you about soon. ;-)

posted by: howard at 01:44 | link | comments (7) |
news