Today is a sad day for Vox fans. After having launched the social networking blog platform in 2006, it looks as if the Six Apart execs are shutting down Vox at the end of the month.
Vox has been a fun place to explore, create and connect with your friends. But Vox is closing its doors on September 30, 2010.
This doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye to your blog. We want you to make sure you can keep the great content you’ve shared on Vox, and continue to have a home for your blog. To help you make the transition off of Vox, we’ve added new export features that make it easy to move your blog to a free TypePad account, and your photos & videos to Flickr. (Official Vox Blog)
The few passionate users of the service are not thrilled with the news (as one can tell by the comment section) and many are already reporting errors when it comes to migrating to Typepad and Flickr.
Users of Vox probably need a premium service of Typepad or Flickr in order to transport all of their media content or consider migrating to free platforms like WordPress or Posterous (which Six Apart to their credit also mentions).
While news of the site’s shut down comes as no surprise (as not many people were apparently on Vox), Michael Arrington is reporting of rumors about a merger between Six Apart and VideoEgg.
Rumors of a Six Apart acquisition began swirling yesterday. Our sources suggest that Six Apart and VideoEgg will merge and that Six Apart will come away with 25% of the new company. […]
Says a source, “Six Apart is hosed, so they are screwing [VideoEgg] by making them buy Six Apart – and [thereby] diluting [VideoEgg] shareholders.” (Business Insider)
If true, this would be bad news for Six Apart’s investors, especially since the company recently purchased NaturalPath Media in June.
While Six Apart has yet to show any signs of joining Vox on the endangered species list (as the company “looks” profitable), hopefully the team can put some new life into both Typepad and Movabletype (the latter which could potentially challenge WordPress).
I just heard about Vox closing. I do have an account there and really did like Vox, but never had time to put into another blog. Sad to see it closing none the less.
I wish Six Apart would get on the ball again with Movable Type. It would be a great challenger for WordPress. Speaking as someone who was a dedicated MT user years ago, before WP was out of diapers. Now I use WP mainly because it has the community and support which MT has lacked for many years. I don’t know how MT fell so far or so easily. I really don’t know why the Trotts let it happen. Seemed to start when they took away the freebie MT version. But, even when they brought it back they could not so easily regain the ground lost to the always free WordPress.
I still have a domain with Movable Type software. I just don’t get much done with it. There is so little in the way of support or community that when trouble arises you are just left on your own to figure it all out. So my Movable Type blogs are on the sidelines, needing more time to get them functional. Meanwhile the WordPress blog is just fine. But, I miss MT and would convert if it seemed to pick up more support for new plugins, new themes and most of all some user guides that haven’t been mothballed since 2007.
Laura,
The community is actually doing quite well these days. It’s just not getting much media attention since most of its work is on GitHub. Here’s a post of mine that details a lot of the more recent work (note: some of the themes listed there are still under development).
Forgot to add Maarten Schenk’s site Movable Tips. He does a good job on posting what’s new with Movable Type:
http://www.movabletips.com/
And also, the doc not updated since 2007 is just false. Yes the community is small, but almost each and every time someone complains about the lack of it, it’s someone who never contributes to it. Want MT community to get better? Stop complaining and participate. Case in point: each time I have a problem with MT, I ask the community and get an helpful answer. I report bugs and they get fixed. How comes Laura cannot?
“Users of Vox probably need a premium service of Typepad or Flickr in order to transport all of their media content or consider migrating to free platforms like WordPress or Posterous (which Six Apart to their credit also mentions).”
That’s not quite accurate. I moved my Vox blogs to both services. All my media transferred nearly seamlessly to TypePad. WordPress could not accept my video files because that’s a paid service there. The photos and audio files transferred, but their formatting within the pages is mostly gone.
Six Apart are not the owners of Vox. Fox Studios own Vox (way back when). Fox is owned by a girl not a guy and it was never a give away. Maybe they have amnesia? It was copyrighted under Fox. Thus, I expect we will see Six Apart in court (some day) as a copyright is a copyright. And, Vox, was doing OH SO WELL. It breaks the heart. One can never trust a janitor and his son…I guess…so what else is new?