Six Apart launches new service

[foxfirefey]

Six Apart (LJ's parent company) has just released a preview of their new blogging platform "Vox", originally named "Comet", adding to their product lines of LiveJournal, TypePad, and Moveable Type. Vox is free and ad-supported. So far the ads look to be from Google's AdSense, all text based, and very out of the way at the bottom of the page (

Comments

[donutgirl]

very interesting.How is Vox different from TypePad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal?

TypePad and Movable Type are the first choice for professionals, businesses, and anyone who needs to take complete control of their public-facing communications. They are the ultimate ad-free tools for commercial blogging.

LiveJournal has grown to be an amazing community of fiercely independent bloggers, primarily teenagers and twenty-somethings. Over the past seven years, that community has developed in both its scope and its need for powerful customization. We think that Vox will be a great choice for bloggers looking for a more turnkey environment that balances community and privacy.
Hmm. I've always thought LJ was extremely user-friendly and easy to set up. You can easily set up an account and get posting within a few minutes, so I'm not quite sure how Vox is improving on that. If that's true about the type and placement of ads, it seems like that would be Vox's main advantage over LJ

[foxfirefey]

Vox doesn't look like it can do the style customizations LJ is capable of; that probably makes changing and developing the service a lot easier. (See: all the customizations of journals that didn't work with Sponsored+.)

Threaded comments? What is UP with blogs? I think all comments should be threaded. C'mon, blogs, get with it! I'm tired of reading through your long, linear formats where people are responding to something other people said fifty comments back!

I don't see community aspects, which is one of the main features that really spurred LJ development.

Vox has abilities LJ doesn't, though, especially with regards to media integration.

[donutgirl]

Yeah, threaded comments seem like a no-brainer to me -- I have no idea why they didn't pick that up. It's one thing I'll really miss when I leave LJ.

hey, remember that off-site poll we all took a while back? The one that nominally consulted us about ads, but actually asked loads of weird questions about which LJ features we preferred? I guess they were using that to figure out which elements to snag for Vox.

[foxfirefey]

I'm going to be researching threaded comments for WordPress when I get to that point--I know that several people have written plugins for that.

I didn't take that poll, so I don't know what it asked about ads or the other features. But it would make sense to use the results of that poll to create Vox's featureset, in a way.

[kunzite1]

vox_team_rss:

[matgb]

Via Mena's Vox:
http://mena.vox.com/library/post/behind-the-curtain-out-of-the-cupboard.html
Much of the backend infrastructure that powers Vox originated with LiveJournal and powers other massive sites like the Wikipedia and Slashdot.

Is it me, or are the "advantages" of Vox that they're touting pre-existing on LJ?

[ex_uniquewo]

It's not you. :)

[donutgirl]

I agree as well. The thing they're pushing the hardest is the privacy levels, which LJ has been doing since forever. And they're acting like it's a hot new idea.

It's hard to tell too much right now, but I'm getting the impression that the feature differences between Vox and LJ are negligible -- the real difference is in marketing. 6A wants to market this "product" to older people who are new to blogging. It looks like they're selling it as "your grandma's blogging tool."

[foxfirefey]

S'not too icky, the "they" is just using "Typepad and Moveable Type" as an antecedent, which is a pretty common convention. I think. Maybe.