Vox: what happened, and why it shut down

Vox was a blogging service from Six Apart, announced in 2005 under the codename Project Comet and launched publicly on 26 October 2006. It was built for personal, private writing: clean templates, no HTML to learn, and privacy settings on every post so you could publish to the world, to friends, or to family only. It closed on 30 September 2010.

Timeline [edit]

2005

21 September 2005 other

Project Comet announced at DEMO

2006

March 2006 other

Private alpha

June 2006 other

Public beta as Vox

26 October 2006 Launch

Vox opens to everyone

Privacy controls on every post.

2010

2 September 2010 Shutdown announced

Six Apart says Vox will close

Export to TypePad or Flickr.

30 September 2010 Shutdown

Vox closes

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Six Apart announced on 2 September 2010 that Vox would close at the end of the month. Posts could be exported to TypePad or the photos moved to Flickr. Six Apart itself was sold to SAY Media weeks later, and the vox.com address was eventually bought by Vox Media.

Our analysis: Vox was designed for a fear that Facebook cured first. Its whole pitch was that you could write something and show it only to your family, or only to friends, with a permissions box on every post, at a moment when most people had decided that a status update on a social network was enough writing. It also arrived while Six Apart was running three other blogging products, Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal, and it never got the attention or the mobile app it needed. When the company had to choose what to fund, the free one with the smallest audience went.

History [edit]

Blogging for people who did not want to be publishers

Six Apart already owned Movable Type, the software serious bloggers ran, TypePad, the hosted version, and from January 2005 LiveJournal. What it did not have was something for a person who wanted to put up photographs of a birthday and let only their family see them. Mena Trott announced Project Comet at DEMO in September 2005 and it became Vox, in private alpha in March 2006, public beta in June, and open to everyone on 26 October 2006.

The product was a neat answer to a real question. Every post had a privacy control: everyone, friends, family, or just you. There was no HTML, no templates to fight, and a library that pulled in books from Amazon, videos from YouTube and photos from Flickr and Photobucket in a couple of clicks. It was written in Perl on Catalyst. The design was warm, the community was small and pleasant, and for a while the blogging press treated it as the future of personal publishing.

Where the readers went

Facebook opened to everyone in September 2006, six weeks before Vox launched, and it answered the same question by default: a place to write for people you know. Twitter took the short posts. Vox had no mobile app worth the name in the iPhone years, and the company behind it was fighting on too many fronts. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to SUP in 2007 and put its effort into TypePad and its advertising business.

On 2 September 2010 Six Apart said Vox would close on 30 September. Users could move their posts to TypePad or push their photos to Flickr, and many did. Weeks later Six Apart was sold to VideoEgg and the combined company became SAY Media.

The domain today

vox.com is Vox Media\'s news site, which has no connection to the blog. The Vox posts survive only in the Internet Archive and in whatever their authors exported.

Sources [edit]

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Vox