Vox is nothing new

I have to admit, the Scobleizer has inspired a couple fresh posts from me. I quote:

“But after seeing that there’s some value to blogging to just your family or your friends or a small group of people I have to admit I was wrong about Vox.

Vox is pretty darn cool. I told Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress.com, the folks who publish my blog here) yesterday that he should get into Vox and see what’s going on cause tons of people that I trust are doing the Vox thing. It’ll be interesting to see how Wordpress responds. I’d certainly like to have a Wordpress.com blog where I could post something just to my friends and/or family.”

— Scobleizer

The funny thing about Vox is that while the technology is great and the looks are nice, Six Apart has done an amazing job of convincing everyone that it is a totally new product. It really isn’t. It is, for the most part, a combination of technology offered by LiveJournal and Typepad, two products that are also, not surprisingly, owned by Six Apart. One of Vox’s biggest features, per-post control over who can view what, is really just a reuse of a feature that LiveJournal offers:

“I’ve been using Livejournal for about 5 years and they have *fantastic* “custom friends groups” which allow you to choose who can read what. You can make entries public, friends only, custom friends only (you can choose who can’t see the post) or completely private. I know that Livejournal isn’t really taken seriously among ‘bloggers’, but it has great features and an nice sense of community. It’s easy to find people talking about what you’re interested in.”

— mp

(Hmm, this reminds me of that time that I said I preferred LiveJournal over Wordpress.com…)

All in all, I’m not dissing Vox as a product; it’s a really sophisticated, modern blogging platform for those who want to reach friends and family. I don’t think, however, that it’s something Wordpress needs to look at. Wordpress.com offers a professional blogging platform for people who want to do real blogging, the kind of online writing that is actually intended to reach a public audience. Private blogging like the kind that Vox offers isn’t really blogging at all… in the days of LiveJournal we called it journaling, and as much as bloggers may try to mutilate the term “blogging” even more to apply it to this rehashed technology, the two are just not the same. There are journals and then there are blogs; journals are private or maybe public without an intent to reach a greater audience, blogs are (or at least always should be) public. There’s no need for Wordpress.com to try and duplicate the features Vox offers… it caters to a different audience and they have their own features they would like to see implemented. I’m sure there are a few users who take advantage of Wordpress’ post/blog access features, but I doubt that it’s nearly as common as what you see in a community like Vox.

Oh, and I should also mention that similar functionality is available on Facebook Notes, though I don’t think it’s at a per-post level. I bring this up because if I want to reach friends, I can reach the most through a community like Facebook, not Vox. On Facebook I can reach users who don’t blog themselves… on Vox you are only in a community of bloggers, which is all right if all your friends are the blogging type, but fruitless otherwise.