Formerly code-named Comet, Six Apart's fourth blogging platform attempts to capitalize on social networking trends and privacy concerns.Six Apart is set to start letting users test a new blogging platform named Vox on June 1.
Vox, currently known by its code name "Comet," is a free, hosted blogging service. It is Six Apart's fourth blogging platform, following Moveable Type, LiveJournal and TypePad, which combined have over 30 million users worldwide, according to the company.
With Vox, Six Apart is trying to capitalize on several emerging online trends, including privacy concerns and the excitement over social networking sites.
"We're saying tomorrow is more of a groundbreaking, not a ribbon cutting," said Andrew Anker, general manager of Vox.
Vox is currently in preview mode, according to Anker, and the company will continue to incorporate new features and bug fixes about every two weeks this summer. As of this writing, the platform is at release .7 and still branded "Comet."
Unlike Six Apart's previous platforms, Vox is designed to balance a user's desire for privacy with his or her need to share information with friends and family.
"The thing that has made it difficult for the mainstream sites to attract a mainstream audience -- and here I'm talking about the Yahoo 360s and the MSN Spaces -- is that they immediately jump to the masses," said Anker. "And the masses do come. And they look at it and they say 'what is this?' You end up building a ghost town that way."
Six Apart hopes that by working closely with an influx of early adopters to build content that successive waves of users will find the site more intimate and useful. "People, not programmers, make social media work," he said.
Vox is built around the idea of "neighborhoods," or groups of bloggers who are friends with each other. Users are able to mark their posts private and share them with only specific groups of users.
On the public side of the equation, Vox is also designed to incorporate popular Internet sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Amazon.
Building on the idea of using blogs for "identity production," Vox allows users to easily incorporate references to their favorite books, images from photo sites, and audio and video files. Users can then group this media into categories, such as "Beach Reads" or "My Bedroom."
Six Apart plans to open Vox to the public later this year. Planned features include better integration with Flickr, integration with another photo site, and implementing groups around conversation topics.
Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott first mentioned "Comet" during the DEMO conference in September 2005.
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