Comments on: Voxiversary on the Horizon

By: Vox Stops: Six Apart? « Changing Way

Vox Stops: Six Apart? « Changing Way — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:29:11 +0000

[...] lived up to 6A’s hopes for it to be “home, home, on the web” for a great many. I said so around Vox’s first anniversary. Anil Dash, who was 6A’s chief evangelist at the time, left a Vox-defending comment. At the [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:56:47 +0000

Anil,
Thanks for your comments.
- LJ is certainly an interesting case. Someone should write it up!
- The “learning and growth” perspective is the most interesting on most firms and products, and I didn’t dig deep enough into Vox to give that perspective the salience it deserves.
- Alexa data are indeed suspect. But what data should we use instead? And are WordPress and Facebook users less inclined to use the “obscure browser toolbar” in question than LJ users?
One of the reasons I made the Voxiversary post this early is to bring such questions to the surface so that we* have time to investigate them before the day itself in October.
* We = ??
Thanks again, Andrew

By: Anil

Anil — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:27:46 +0000

Oh, I figured it goes without saying, but people are still using Alexa’s data? Really? I wouldn’t suppose Vox’s audience installs obscure browser toolbars, at any rate.

By: Anil

Anil — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:22:22 +0000

I think all these services do such different things it’s hard to compare them. And it doesn’t really measure how much people care about the services they use — which seems like a more valuable metric. Or else MySpace is full of meaningful connections, and I’m nuts.

I think we’re happy iterating on Vox (there are constantly new features and things going out) and to me it feels a lot like Flickr in the early days, where we can spend the time to try new things out and see how the community responds. I’m sure if you look at Flickr’s line in 2004 when it was about the same age, there were people wringing their hands over that as well.

I think Facebook, for example, has been very gracious with crediting that a lot of the open source tech they’ve used (and made vast improvements to!) came from the LiveJournal team, which also really helped shape Vox’s technology. So from the standpoint of helping grow the medium, and getting people connecting online, I think we’re still making an outsized contribution, and that’s a more meaningful measure for me, personally — we’re thriving, but helping other companies and communities grow, too.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 08:06:09 +0000

WordPress.com went public the beginning of 2006, and anyone around at the time can attest it wasn’t mature.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:49:59 +0000

Tallac,
Thanks for your comment and for your kind words about this blog. I see your point about Vox being a young product. But, unlike Facebook and WordPress, Vox is a young product from an established firm that spent a lot of $ on it.

By: Tallac

Tallac — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:53:53 +0000

Andrew,

I am not too sure that this is an apples to oranges comparison. You are comparing two mature products and one product that officially launched less than a year ago. Go back a take a look at the Alexa graphs for Facebook and WordPress during their early years and I think that you will see a trend similar to what you are seeing now for Vox.

I think that substituting TypePad for Vox would have made your argument more viable.

That said, I like your blog and appreciate the insight.

Regards,

Tallac