Vox seems like a failure (not sure why Vox failed)
You want a serious answer to that? ;)
The fundamental underlying answer is 'mismanagement and flaws in the core concept', but it breaks down to:
1). Lack of feature development, usability improvements, and bugfixes. Their pace of innovation was so glacial that people drifted away when they realized that things that annoyed them wouldn't get fixed.
2). No community identity. For the small-social-network market, it's critical to have early adopters come from a particular (self-identified) community, like how MySpace did music, Facebook did colleges, and LJ, at the very very beginning, did camgirls. Vox had no built-in market, no 'hook' to get people to pay attention, and no 'story' that the people marketing the product were telling.
3). No customer engagement. The people using the site had no clear route to provide feedback, and the people making the decisions for the site had no way of polling the userbase. There was no central pillar of community news and no easy way for site adminstrators to disseminate a mass message without resorting to email (which most people delete unread).
Six Apart was never very good at community creation and nurturing. Fundamentally, the people in charge never understood what makes a viable online community; they were trying to use the same techniques they applied to creating a hosted broadcast service in TypePad, and broadcast and social media are fundamentally two separate beasts.
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mmmag
no subject
Date: 2009-11-19 04:55 am (UTC)You want a serious answer to that? ;)
The fundamental underlying answer is 'mismanagement and flaws in the core concept', but it breaks down to:
1). Lack of feature development, usability improvements, and bugfixes. Their pace of innovation was so glacial that people drifted away when they realized that things that annoyed them wouldn't get fixed.
2). No community identity. For the small-social-network market, it's critical to have early adopters come from a particular (self-identified) community, like how MySpace did music, Facebook did colleges, and LJ, at the very very beginning, did camgirls. Vox had no built-in market, no 'hook' to get people to pay attention, and no 'story' that the people marketing the product were telling.
3). No customer engagement. The people using the site had no clear route to provide feedback, and the people making the decisions for the site had no way of polling the userbase. There was no central pillar of community news and no easy way for site adminstrators to disseminate a mass message without resorting to email (which most people delete unread).
Six Apart was never very good at community creation and nurturing. Fundamentally, the people in charge never understood what makes a viable online community; they were trying to use the same techniques they applied to creating a hosted broadcast service in TypePad, and broadcast and social media are fundamentally two separate beasts.