Vox redux

As a long-term user of both Livejournal and Typepad, I got to look at SixApart's Vox early in its long beta and therefore reviewed it (largely unfavourably) in August. Now it's fully launched it's getting a lot more attention, with Steve Rubel noting that it's got 85,000 users and TechCrunch commenting that

"One of the things that users are going to love about Vox is that the advertising is incredibly unobtrusive."

Well...no, not really. As I've been saying for a while, SixApart's natural  constituency for this site is LiveJournal users looking to migrate to a modern, all-singing all-dancing web2.0 version of their old social network. Success for a social network is all about critical mass, about cracking that chicken-and-egg network effect problem that MySpace has so comprehensively wrapped-up, that all the people go where all the people are because all the people are there. SixApart  has a big advantage over a start-up in getting over that first hurdle if it can get its existing LJ constituency over to Vox, but it's things like the advertising that will put off Livejournal users accustomed to a completely ad-free experience.

As I commented over at Micropersuasion, I know a lot of LJ users who have signed up for Vox to see what it's all about (myself included) and then gone right back to LJ when the trivial benefits didn't outweigh the non-trivial switching costs. Peter Cashmore at Mashable also asks whether SixApart needed a whole new site when they could have simply worked on improving LJ and Typepad.

Perhaps SixApart calculated, sensibly, that people would rather be given the option to change rather than have change forced upon them - few people are really as comfortable with change as they like to make out. But to get LiveJournal users to switch it has to offer sufficient real benefit to justify both the switching costs and the increased commercial clutter, and while TechCrunch finds the ads unobtrusive I really can't see enough benefits in Vox to justify the move.