more background on LJ and Vox
I found this information via Google blog search. It contains Anil Dash of Six Apart speaking quite candidly about Vox and how it fits in with LiveJournal (many LiveJournal users are feeling very neglected right now) and TypePad.
If anybody's really interested in this topic, I suggest that they read the entire thread, and not form too many opinions from my excerpts. There is always a risk that excerpting and summarizing can take words out of context and distort. I've tried not to do that. I decided that it was still worth doing, because I found his comments very interesting and they were rather buried in a long thread. I wanted to make this information more available.
Finally, I must repeat his disclaimer that these are just his opinions, not Six Apart's.
Caveats taken care of, this is some of what he said:
Now, the question I must ask myself - if Vox is aimed at an older and less techie and more mainstream type of crowd, am I going to decide that I don't want to like it any more? Does a part of me want to rebel from being pigeon-holed in such terms? I think that for the time being, I'm going to pretend that I didn't read those final few paragraphs. I'll continue evaluating Vox on its face value. If I am honest with myself, I will admit that I'm not the most techie guy in the world. After all, my main blog is on TypePad, not WordPress or MovableType. I will dabble with technology to advance the primary goal which is writing and other content, but I don't enjoy dabbling more than I need to.Vox will be free and ad-supported.
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To be honest, we're deliberately not talking a whole bunch about Vox's business model and even the features because it's still *really* early. We're going to let the community tell us how things should work and when certain parts are done. Basically, it's a case of not wanting to promote somethat that most people can't even see, let alone make use of. If we were talking a lot about it, I'm sure we'd get grief for being a bunch of Web 2.0 hypesters, and that'd be a fair criticism, too. So we chose to get grief for being too closed, and that's a fair point.
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Truth is, Vox will never have all the stuff LJ has, probably. Like, LJ has Singles and a To-Do list and god only knows what else. I sure *hope* Vox never has all the features TypePad has. ("I need to customize my feed URLs!") But we will be sharing the best, most useful parts between all three platforms, and Vox is already starting to have its own distinct community.
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Truth be told, I think a lot people took the statement of *fact* that LiveJournal is a predominantly young community as something other than what it was. LJ, to me, is more about people who want a community and are very comfortable with the fact that they're not "mainstream". (Whatever that means.) Hell, most of us on LJ are proud of that fact.
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Vox is more for people who don't really care about technology, but want to connect with friends and family. My gut tells me that skews older and less techie and probably more mainstream. Is there some overlap? Sure. Does that mean OH NOES EVERYONE PANIC!!!1!
I don't think so. :)
Comments
Thank you for posting this. I'm still very undecided about Vox (since I only have a starter account and can't do much with it). As a LiveJournal user, I can say a lot of us were upset because, the information that was given made it seem that LJ was going to be geared for the MySpace crowd and Vox was for those of us that stay way from those types of services. We felt insulted, especially us older blogger and I'm only 37, because we were not considered "mainstream" despite the fact that we are the ones that usually pay for the service just to get all the extra features that comes along with a paid account. Heck, some even paid for permanent accounts. I'm not the most techie, but I do like having the ability to design my own blog. Yes, I do have a blog independent of these "point-n-click" type of services, but my blog doesn't have a "flist(friends list)* and I don't want to give up on them.
So yeah, I love LJ. I'm willing to give Vox a try and, once upgraded and if any invites come along or maybe in the fall when Vox comes out for the public, I'll recommend that the people on my flist try the service out. Hey, you never know. We might just like it better than LJ once everything has been completed.
Thanks for your comment. I can why there’s been a big kerfuffle on LJ about this. I really like LJ too. I’ve been on it for over 4 years, and it’s been a very important place in my life. Recently that has diminished, and I’m at a loss to say why, other than less time in general and sometimes feeling a little confined in the LJ walled garden. It’s hard for me to tell whether Six Apart has made a big mistake here or not. Maybe instead of diverting resources into a completely service, they should have improved LJ and marketed it better. On the other hand, a lot of people like LJ exactly the way it is. Then I can see why 6A would create a completely different platform. Whether or not Vox is a good idea, 6A has definitely done a bad job of communicating its plans - to LJ users in particular. Especially when there were rumours that LJ is being made into another MySpace. When I look at Vox at face value, without any of the LJ baggage, it does seem very inviting.