Six Apart sucks (really)
Vox sucks. I figured it would suck. It’s a product from Six Apart. Six Apart went from being the darling of all the blogging companies to…sucking.
I was originally going to call this article “Vox sucks,” but when I started writing I realized that it’s not just Vox, it’s all of the products under the Six Apart banner. There is nothing innovative about them anymore. Moveable Type was a brilliant product a few years ago. The internet moves quickly, Moveable Type moves slowly, thus Moveable Type is out dated, slow, and a pain in the ass to work with.
The LiveJournal acquisition made sense. LiveJournal has a solid community and is popular among certain demographics. But how many popular blogs are based on LiveJournal? The site consists of thousands of online diaries written and read by close friends. The reach of a LiveJournal “blog” is laughable.
TypePad is a great entry level blogging platform. But they make people pay for any options that are powerful. I know, WordPress does the same thing. But WordPress also has an open source solution at WordPress.org that is a snap to install. The free alternative to TypePad, Moveable Type, takes even an advanced users a significant amount of time to setup and configure (significant in comparison to the 3 minutes I spend setting up a WordPress install).
Lets go back to the original product that sparked this entry: Vox. I already told you, it sucks. The front page says you can do 5 things. None are groundbreaking.
- Design it in flash. MySpace lets their users design their own profile pages. Every MySpace pages looks awful.
- Share media from YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, etc. Doesn’t every available blogging platform already allow this? Why do I need a Vox account?
- Share photos. I share photos using Flickr…I don’t need a Vox account to do that. And if I wanted everyone at Ohio State to see my photos I’d use Facebook.
- Keep in touch with your world. This would work if my friends and family were using Vox, I guess. But they’re using that handy new invention called email. And every person I meet has a Facebook account.
- Control your privacy. Well, at least they won’t have problems with sexual predators crawling their site.
So what Vox has done is take a lot of ideas that already work, and throw them into one spot. It’s like Six Apart took a blender, threw in Blogger, MySpace, and a few Web 2.0 ideas and decided it would make a great product.
So will Vox be successful? Probably among certain groups of people. Michael Arrington points out the beta group consisting of artsy San Francisco people caught on. Will it take off on the scale that other social networks have? I doubt it. Why would anyone switch from Facebook or MySpace to Vox? The feature set might be a little bit better, but the fact that all their friends already belong to the two most popular networks doesn’t give much incentive to switch.
29 responses so far ↓
27 Oct 2006 at 5:31 am
I tried out Vox but then ditched it right away in favor of just using Wordpress.com. It is a much better product, at least for me.
27 Oct 2006 at 7:39 am
Yeah, I tried out the bet and didn’t go back. No one I know uses or will use it. The one blog I read off there is from a gaming journalist turned freelance and that’s cool, but not enough to make me use it. I think some of the design templates are cool, which I could see attracting the type of people they are going after with Vox.
27 Oct 2006 at 4:27 pm
Interesting feedback, Ben… I think the key thing that informs your frustration/dismissal/whatever for a lot of our work comes from your assumptions that everyone who blogs is like you, or blogs for similar reasons that you do. And, well, they don’t. So it’s no wonder the services or tools that are right for them seem lame or sucky to you.
First, you say we’re not innovative… but I’m not sure you understand all the ways there are to innovate. For example, our main focus is to get new people blogging. Not to have them waste time switching between different tools or learning about technology, but just jumping in and discovering the great things about blogs. You say ,”Moveable Type moves slowly, thus Moveable Type is out dated, slow, and a pain in the ass to work with.”
Besides being inaccurate, you miss the point — businesses or busy professionals don’t want to be updating software constantly. If your site’s a hobby that’s just for fun, sure, you can update every other week and it’s no big deal. If you have 10,000 employees whose work depends on their blogs being up and running, you don’t want to upgrade more than once a year at the most, just like with an email server or any other kind of application. Hell, companies are still running versions of Microsoft Office that are 5 or 6 or more years old, simply because they value stability and reliability over gee-whiz stuff.
Then you ask, “But how many popular blogs are based on LiveJournal?” That’s like saying “how many Gmail accounts send messages to a 100,000 people?” Why would you measure someone’s tool for personal communication by how many strangers are seeing it? You’re applying your own measure of your goals for a blog in a situation where it doesn’t apply — people talk to their friends and family or join communities of interest on LJ, and they do it by the millions.
That’s really what it takes to help grow blogging — to make things that appeal to a broad number of people. There are companies who make blogging software who have a party when they get 10,000 users. And then there are companies who do that every day. To my way of thinking, being content with having a tiny group of a few thousand or even hundreds of thousands of bloggers is elitist, and means that you don’t really want everyone to benefit from blogging, just those who meet your standards for being cool/Web 2.0/insert-buzzword-here.
You use Gmail — all it does is send and receive messages using SMTP, which has been around for decades, and add labels and maybe let you track email by conversation. As you might say, “None are groundbreaking”. However, it’s a tool that you find useful for communicating with the people you care about. Hey, whadaya know, the same thing is true for Vox.
One last point, you describe Vox’s audience as “the beta group consisting of artsy San Francisco people”. We’ve launched simultaneously in France, Japan, and here in the U.S. We actually put our money where our mouth is about getting different kinds of people to start blogging. I think if you had a broader view of what blogging can be, and perhaps a little more humility about your views of it, you might see that, actually, Six Apart doesn’t suck. Dissing people who are trying to help people benefit from the Internet actually does suck, though.
I’ve rambled long enough… feel free to email or call me at 646-541-5843 or IM me at anildash if you actually want to have a conversation about this stuff.
27 Oct 2006 at 4:54 pm
Anil - your point about Gmail not being innovative is incorrect. The way Gmail organizes my emails and presents them in conversation form is new. Using Google powered search to find old emails is new. Gmail is innovative even if the technology it uses to send and receive the messages isn’t.
My points about Moveable Type were based on previous experience. I found it difficult to work with in comparison to Wordpress and I don’t see any benefits to using MT over WP.
My points about LiveJournal were unfair, and I was comparing LJ users to myself.
When I mentioned the Beta test of Vox I was referring to Michael Arrington’s post at TechCrunch. I didn’t meant to say that would be your only audience, I meant that the appeal of Vox would extend to relatively small groups of people that will congregate around Vox. I guess the challenge will be keeping them from moving to the next big thing when it’s released.
I’m not the first person to criticize Six Apart, in fact most of the points have been brought up before. I wrote this post because I don’t think Vox will help catapult Six Apart back into the spotlight as the greatest company in the blog world.
27 Oct 2006 at 8:27 pm
[…] Blog Software Oct 27 at 10:30 pm by Matt Craven -That’s the question that Ben Bleikamp writes about over at Bleikamp.com. And his answer is… Six Apart sucks (really)…. […]
27 Oct 2006 at 10:55 pm
I STG, Anil Dash must have an alert pop up on his screen every time Technorati picks up a mention of Six Apart. LOL! Same old same old with ol’ Anil: laughably defensive, dismissive of complaints.
Hey Anil: Why don’t you guys toughen up that thin skin and actually, y’know, LISTEN to what people are telling you? That might make a lot more difference in Six Apart’s reach than spawning new crappy products to n00bs. As soon as a n00b figures out there’s better stuff out there, they leave for Wordpress. Why not try to keep established bloggers around and singing the praises of SA, rather than “dashing” around to rebut (dismiss) detractors’ complaints?
I mean really, it’s not like this guy’s going to delete his post to hide the bad PR for you!
Sorry for keeping my name/URL out of the ID, Ben; I don’t care to have Anil Dash trolling my comments (again).
28 Oct 2006 at 1:47 am
Six Apart is what was. A few years back, they were hot. These days - they’re simply trying to… not even keep pace… but desperately keep up.
Wordpress is a far superior product and continues to outshine any SA product every single day with it’s large dev. community.
SA lost my vote back with the launch of the MT licensing. I ported over to WP and never once looked back. I still do MT and TP blogs for clients - but working with those products is like pulling teeth, compared to WP.
Anil has been keeping up with Technorati hits on SA posts for years. He makes an appearance in just about every SA dissenting post - without fail. It’s his job - and he does it well, just too bad he’s putting good talent to waste on a declining enterprise.
28 Oct 2006 at 2:44 pm
“Hey Anil: Why don’t you guys toughen up that thin skin and actually, y’know, LISTEN to what people are telling you? That might make a lot more difference in Six Apart’s reach than spawning new crappy products to n00bs.”
Hey, I definitely agree we have a lot of work to do to improve our software, like everyone who makes software does. Can we/should we be improving the experience for MT users? Absolutely, and I think we’d be the first to admit it.
But all software has bugs, or usability problems, or just new features/improvements that need to be made. That doesn’t mean a software company sucks. We’re an ethical company that works damn hard to make sure people can get the most from the web, so I unapologetically defend us.
To put it simply, I believe in what I do, and in what the other people who work at 6A do.
The main reason I reply is to correct misstatements, either intentional or unintentional. The fact of the matter is, Six Apart isn’t a declining enterprise: We’ve got millions of customers and are growing quickly all over the world. We don’t actually have very many people who switch from our tools to other software, despite the attention that some people would want to focus on that tiny minority.
And to put it succinctly, we don’t focus on getting people to switch from other blogging tools to ours so much as we get people to switch from not blogging to having a blog. There are literally billions of people who’ve never even experimented with this medium, and that’s how we measure success — by the number of people who are blogging. Some people are gonna use other tools (hell, there are millions of people on MSN Spaces, and more power to them) and if they want to, that’s fine, as long as they get to participate.
Maybe those who think I’m a shill or that 6A is uncool among their own circle of friends think it’s more important what software you’re using than that you’re communicating with the people you care about. I don’t.
28 Oct 2006 at 2:57 pm
Criticizing a blogging company for not be innovative is a cheap shot, rather like criticizing the local bakery for not being innovative.
Blogging is pubishing. Take away things like the need to marry comments to the right post and generating links to archived pages, blogging is really simply publishing: Just one flat page after another.
SixApart takes one approach, others take another approach. Why dump on SixApart? Do WordPress and all the rest merit being called innovative just because they chose to stuff everything in MySQL and use PHP?
I’ve used MT, switched to
WP, and I’m think of going back to MT. MT’s approach requires non-instantaneous rebuilds. But, WP’s approach requires non-instantaneous “let’s wait for the database to do its thing” sessions. It isn’t rare to wait 2-3 minutes after I post from WP’s Admin panel for control to be returned to me.
I’ve argued that it’s time for a new blogging tool that leapfrogs the current tools. I suspect it needs to combine the capabilities of a hosted service like TypePad with the flexibility of self-hosting.
Personally, I’d be happy if I could offload comments, archives, etc., to a remote service, so I could simply build nice little flat pages in any way I wished and move them to the server in any way I wished.
29 Oct 2006 at 1:29 am
I tried out Vox too, I liked it because it felt girly, but after a day or two the novelty wore off and there wasn’t a lot there below the pretty templates. I wonder how many of their claimed 85,000 users are like me.
If I were to take a step back and put my business hat on, I would say Six Apart has raised a lot of money and is under serious pressure to grow their user base, which has started to stagnate due to innovative competition and being way behind the times. (If MT or Typepad had kicked serious ass then Youtube, Wordpress, Flickr would not be around.) Because it’s hard to sell or go public when your growth has already peaked, they pitched a brand new development effort to bet the company on, like a Yahoo 360 done right. Now they’re going to try to make a mainstream push and pour lots of marketing dollars into it.
Two or three years ago, I think it would have been amazing. Now, it will probably just increase their cashflow burn and force them to do another round at a crazy valuation or refocus the business on enterprise, like how they’ve raised the white flag with consumer Movable Type.
29 Oct 2006 at 3:52 am
Suzanne: I wonder how many of their[Vox’s] claimed 85,000 users are like me.
Oh, come now. How can you make a cheap veiled accusation like that without also citing Wordpress.com’s claimed 439thousand(as of this writing) bloggers? Which one sounds more like bullshit to you? Uh huh.
Everybody is fully aware membership numbers are generally made of pixie dust. I have accounts on both services, for little more than the purpose of locking down my name. I also have a LiveJournal account I’ve never considered posting to, but use to keep track of some people I know who do use it. I think I “have” two or three Blogger blogs, also; I can’t even remember at this point.
29 Oct 2006 at 7:02 am
[…] Six Apart sucks (really) Using Vox, this guy makes with the 6A bashing. Anil Dash comes to the rescue in comments. (tags: sixapart vox rants) […]
29 Oct 2006 at 10:43 am
I believe the general rule of thumb is 1 in 10 users are active. So Vox would have about 10,000 active users (maybe more since they just launched) and WordPress would have aroudn 50,000…
29 Oct 2006 at 12:23 pm
Hey Su! (Also a Suzanne?)
I have no idea how much BS is in the number on WordPress.com’s front page, but they do publish stats every month about the number of posts and comments. Their archives suck but here’s one I found. I also see a link an easy link to delete my account there, which I can’t find on Vox.
Those numbers might suck, but I doubt they’re outright lying at least they’re transparent and up to date and you can use them as starting points like Ben does. Except for Livejournal, SA hides these stats like they’re state secrets, which makes me think they have something to hide.
So whose numbers do I think are bullshit? Six Apart’s. But I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t keep claiming they were the “most popular” this or the “best in the world” that.
The funniest I remember: Movable Type under FastCGI is the fastest blogging system in the world. Yeah right! How long has it been since these guys have tried what else is out there?
30 Oct 2006 at 9:25 am
“That might make a lot more difference in Six Apart’s reach than spawning new crappy products to n00bs. As soon as a n00b figures out there’s better stuff out there, they leave for Wordpress.”
I’m sorry, I can’t take anyone who uses n00b in a sentence seriously.
To be honest, however, I can’t remember the last time an MT powered blog/website died giving a vague database connection error
30 Oct 2006 at 2:58 pm
No, but I see this on Typepad all the time. Now we’ve determined that both services have occasional downtime through screenshots of error messages. Nice point, Lauren.
30 Oct 2006 at 4:50 pm
Suzanne, rather than pointless sniping, it would’ve been more meaningful to point out the fact that the Wordpress error is simply a fact(and risk) of it being a dynamic application rather than producing static files, as MT does by default.
A site using MT’s dynamic publishing option would produce a similar error message. (Dunno about the actual text. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it, which isn’t intended to imply anything.)
30 Oct 2006 at 8:02 pm
Meh, I hate to belabor this conversation even further, but since there’s a question about the 85,000 number, I’ll direct you to the team Vox post that it’s taken from. Highlight:
“There are over 85,000 people currently on Vox who are incredibly active (which is what really matters). That’s a lot of people for a gated invite-only system that has had controlled growth.”
FWIW, it’s a lot higher now, and we don’t like to count inactive users. I think most other services count inactive users, spammers, dead accounts and a whole bunch of other lame things, but that’s not true in this case.
30 Oct 2006 at 8:10 pm
But Anil - there are people in this thread and at other blogs who have said they registered a Vox account to check it out and didn’t like it - you mean tot tell me you already deleted those accounts?
You can’t possibly tell me all your users are active.
31 Oct 2006 at 3:39 pm
I didn’t say every user is active. I said the number we report is active users.
31 Oct 2006 at 3:45 pm
Well then what constitutes an inactive user? Some of these people signed up yesterday and have decided not to use the site anymore. You know they’re not active?
1 Nov 2006 at 7:26 pm
When a service first launches activity should be close to 100% or there is something really wrong, activity numbers will be more interesting 6 months from now. Livejournal has remained pretty steadily at 10-25% for a few years now. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I think that’s probably high for most big services. I guess we will see how Livejournal-for-adults will do.
Anil, anyone in particular who you think counts “inactive users, spammers, dead accounts and a whole bunch of other lame things”?
1 Nov 2006 at 11:31 pm
“Anil, anyone in particular who you think counts “inactive users, spammers, dead accounts and a whole bunch of other lame things”?”
Pretty much everybody? I’m a pretty cynical guy.
1 Nov 2006 at 11:36 pm
I would think more than 50% of MySpace users are inactive…
3 Nov 2006 at 6:16 am
[…] Ben, SixApart is evil. We all knew this already. Remember when they made us start paying for our own work? This Post Made Possible by Freedom to Fascism […]
3 Nov 2006 at 11:20 pm
[…] Ben Bleikamp posts that SixApart, and in particular, Vox sucks. […]
28 Dec 2006 at 9:48 pm
seriously. Vox is one big WTF. It’s trying realllllyyy hard to be something and you are just like…”okayyyyyy..what is the point of all this?”
26 Apr 2007 at 5:24 am
Whats interesting is its always people in our industry (programmers / designers) that rip into other people’s web apps. Almost like they wish that they had thought of the idea first. Couple that with the fact that everyone wants to “invent” the next myspace.
Clue… if you think you can do better… DO IT.
11 Dec 2007 at 10:42 am
amateur and sex board amateur sex
Leave a Comment