I first noticed Vox about the time they changed from the code name of Comet. It was a new thing from SixApart, something that was evidently meant to replace LiveJournal, something to fill the entry-level niche in their offerings. If you needed professional-grade blogging that you hosted yourself, you wanted Movable Type. If you wanted that sort of thing and hosting to boot, you could buy into TypePad. Vox was meant to be the starter product, something that would let you blog, comment, connect with friends, and even provide a certain level of granularity in what you shared – complete with easy integration for pictures, video, and the like. And it made LiveJournal look like something slapped together in Geocities.
I think the ultimate problem was timing. Vox arrived just as MySpace was cresting and Facebook was first opening to non-edu users. Ultimately, most people don’t want to blog – they want an online presence where they can see their friends’ pictures and short status updates. You know…social networking.
It didn’t help that this was about the time WordPress started to go big and capture a lot of the casual blogger market. Vox sort of fell into the space between WordPress and MySpace – and as somebody who’s signed up for every single blogging service imaginable at one point or another, it never really passed the “what’s it for” test for me. I thought it would become the replacement for LJ. Then I thought it would be the secure repository for private rantings. Then it became something I kept around in case it ever became important. I don’t know that I ever used it for anything other than two-line Question Of The Day posts in the last two years-plus.
The rise of Tumblr didn’t do it any favors either. Tumblr and its workalikes filled a niche for people who wanted a blog to post quick articles, pictures, clips, quotes and the like – basically something bigger than Twitter without the hassle and inconvenience of a proper blog – and it’s telling that SixApart soon delivered TypePad Micro. It’s more telling that TypePad Micro is what they’re offering as a transitional tool.
Because at the end of September, Vox is going away. I’ll miss it. The themes were nice, the interface is perfectly usable, it’s the easiest civilian implementation of Movable Type for anyone with an urge to blog – but ultimately, it was just one more thing to sign up for and keep in the ecosystem, and people only have so many services they’ll keep track of. Between Joy’s Law and being in the wrong space at the wrong time, it just didn’t get the traction it needed.