Vox is ded

[charmian]

http://team.vox.com/library/post/vox-is-closing-september-30-2010.html

Vox is going under, possibly because of a rumored merger of Six Apart. Apparently according to Comscore, there are still 5 million monthly visitors (although other web analytics companies say less), but bigger sites have had the plug pulled on them.

Anyway, especially considering that most social media/blogging sites are not public, users generally have no idea about the financials (and current financial health/future health) of a site; therefore, they can only assume that it is unknown how probable it is that the site will go under in the near or distant future. So basically, when you use a lot of these sites, you assume that it could all go kerblooey one day, which isn't a problem if the stuff you post is ephemeral, or if you have a backup. Most of my stuff is pretty ephemeral, and I try to back up when I can. However, backups assume that the format is readable by either by me, or by whatever site I'd like to restore to.

Comments

[matgb]

One of the things I like about DW is they're trying to be public as much as possible about the finances, currently we know they're doing OK thus we have no worries, etc. But yeah, I archived my Tweets for ages as I assumed it was going to fall over soon, I stopped when I got bored of trying to treat Twitter like mini-LJ and instead used it to chat to people.

One thing I like about the way they're closing Vox is, if you switch to their free basic Typepad service, any links to your Vox will, permanently they promise, redirect to your Typepad frontpage, which is better than any other closing site I've seen does.

Not as good as it could be, but keeping the domain should be a requirement of a sane company, thus redirecting subdomains is a basic DB call I suspect.

I'd forgotten it existed until a friend linked to the death post earlier, always was a useless product.

[charmian]

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that it was like an obligation for sites to disclose their finances, just that it was impossible to have any idea without financial figures. But I suppose questions like long term viability are almost those of an investor.

That is pretty useful, I think. That is, unless they get rid of Typepad in the future.

Well, I don't think it was that useless, more that it stagnated and Facebook expanded and expanded and sort of ate their raison d'etre.

[matgb]

Nah, Vox was always useless, not be design, although that didn't help, but by market choice.

When Mena et all launched it, they palpably and obviously didn't know what market to pitch it too, nor did they understand that it was effectively pointless.

When she was doing the publicity circuit for it, her big sales points, apart from the user friendliness, were all stuff LJ had.

They'd bought LJ, presumably for ths staff as is 6As habit, but never, ever, realised what it was they'd actually got. Vox replicated so much of what LJ did, but did it fairly badly.

If, instead, they'd launched it as a user friendly LJ-lite, that could integrate with LJ easily but had different domains (which we know to be possible from the Independent Minds and other newspaper setups) it would've been an immense service, LJs biggest problem (apart from poor management) remains the UI, DW is better but it's still clunky (and improving).

Vox never had a reason to exist, as it was essentially LJ with a few bells. If they'd given those bells to LJ, they'd have had a killer platform. And we probably wouldn't be here on DW.

[feathertail]

WordPress.com might be a good buffer for Vox users. Or just about anyone else!

This post on Planet WordPress explains how.

[charmian]

I agree; I think WP is basically better for Vox users because it does have a privacy aspect to it, although it's only for fifteen users in free mode and doesn't have multiple filters.

[feathertail]

I don't think it's quite the same thing, though ... WP isn't exactly a social network in the same sense that LJ or DW is.

[charmian]

Hmm, I don't know. If they allowed people to have more 'friends' in their private blogs and improved the interface on them (and also added friends groups), they possibly could improve the social there enough to compete with LJ on that front. (But then, they also don't have communities)

[matgb]

they also don't have communities

Don't need them, any blog can have multiple authors, which is effectively better than Comms as you can just bring in new authors to an existing blog, and remove them later if you want.