Vox
Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on
Vox was Six Apart's attempt at friendly, private blogging: clean design, per-post privacy controls, and easy embedding from Flickr, YouTube and Amazon. It ran for four years and closed in September 2010, weeks before Six Apart itself was acquired. Three years later the domain was sold to the news company that uses it today.
Timeline [edit]
- 2005
-
21 September 2005
Launch
Announced as Project Comet
Mena Trott previews it at DEMO Fall.
- 2006
-
26 October 2006
Launch
Vox launches publicly
Per-post privacy controls and easy media embedding.
- 2010
-
2 September 2010
Shutdown announced
Four weeks' notice
Export tools to Typepad and Flickr are provided.
-
15 September 2010
Decline
Posting stops
The site becomes read-only.
-
30 September 2010
Shutdown
Closed at 3:20pm Pacific
A shutdown notice precise to the minute.
- 2013
-
2013
Rebrand
The domain is sold to Vox Media
vox.com becomes a news site with no connection to the blogging service.
The site through time
Browse vox.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: Six Apart announced on 2 September 2010 that Vox would close at the end of the month. New posts stopped on 15 September and the site closed permanently on 30 September 2010 at 3:20pm Pacific.
Our analysis: Six Apart was running three blogging products at once: Movable Type for people who wanted a server, Typepad for people who wanted a subscription, and Vox for people who wanted neither. Vox was the newest and the least profitable, and it went first when the company was sold.
History [edit]
Project Comet
Mena Trott announced it as "Project Comet" at DEMO Fall in September 2005. It went to private alpha in March 2006, public beta in June, and launched properly on 26 October 2006 as Vox.
What set it apart was privacy at the level of the individual post. Every entry could be public, or limited to friends, or to family, or to nobody but you, which almost nothing else offered at the time. It was written in Perl on the Catalyst framework, it looked clean at a time when blogs mostly did not, and it made embedding media from Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket and Amazon a two-click operation.
Three products, one company
Six Apart now had Movable Type, Typepad and Vox competing for the same users at different price points, plus LiveJournal, which it had bought in 2005 and sold in 2007. Vox was free, which made it the one paying for itself least.
On 2 September 2010 Six Apart announced that Vox would close at the end of the month, with export tools to Typepad and Flickr. Posting stopped on 15 September. The site closed permanently on 30 September 2010 at 3:20 in the afternoon, Pacific time, a level of precision almost no shutdown notice bothers with.
Days later, VideoEgg acquired Six Apart and the combined company became SAY Media.
The name outlived the product
In 2013 SAY Media sold vox.com to Vox Media, where it became the news site of the same name. If you follow the domain in this record's fact box you will land there. It has no connection to the blogging service described here beyond the six letters.
Similar projects
App.net
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2012–2017
Windows Live Spaces
30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move
2004–2011
Open Diary
Invented the comment, in 1998
1998–2014
Pownce
Eighteen months, and invitations sold on eBay
2007–2008
Typepad
Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years
2003–2025
Posterous
Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off
2008–2013
Sources [edit]
- Six Apart And Vox: How Promise Gets Squandered TechCrunch 3 September 2010 [archived]
- Blogging platforms of the period ZDNet 1 January 2006 [archived]
Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).