Is Vox.com a MySpace Killer?

At least according to Kevin Burton, Vox will “kill” WordPress and MySpace. I took a quick look but I didn’t sign up. I just don’t care to be a member of another blogging/social networking website. I didn’t even have a WordPress.com account and that was what I generally recommend to people who want to set up a blog but don’t want to worry about hosting. Blogger seems to have more spam problems and MySpace tries to be all things to all people.

Vox vows to play “well with other web services” but I still wonder why after going through all the trouble of uploading your wedding photos to Flickr, inviting all your friends to Friendster, your business associates to LinkedIn, and publishing for a year or so at any of the existing free blogging services you move everything to Vox? The longer someone uses a service, the more data they have entered into it, the bigger the switching cost involved.

In 2006, Emlyn moved his blog from Drupal to WordPress partly as a result of my recommendations, but it still took work and a certain level of technical expertise. Having moved his blog a number of times over the years, I’m sure Emlyn will assure you maintaining the same websites, let alone the same WordPress blog for twenty plus years is harder than it looks. Based on the webpages being made over at MySpace I don’t think the average user could migrate all their postings, photos, and friends easily. There are some tools to move from blogging software X to WordPress, the switching cost is high the more content you create.

Vox or MySpace who had the better run?

It has to be MySpace, even though I made fun of the web design, some people remember that website fondly. Tom did alright. Based on some Googling when I updated this blog post in 2026, I’m not sure Vox ended on a high note. It certainly didn’t kill MySpace, Facebook killed MySpace and that website may not have been on Kevin’s radar twenty years ago. Here are two retrospectives of that time written by people closer to the Truth than I:

• WordPress, Six Apart silences and communities
• Vox FAIL – Blogging Platform Shutting as of September 30th

Apparently Coding Horror, a blog I remember from back in the day, was a long time user of Moveable Type. I famously put up my first homepage in 1995 and first WordPress blog roughly ten years later, so I too remember the Web 1.0 blogging era where you just did everything yourself. I missed the demise of Vox.com in September 2010, I undoubtably had my own problems, some of those problems persist into 2026 as I’m not supposed to be blogging, I’m supposed to be studying, and I’m certainly not supposed to be trying to fix my taxonomy for the umpteenth time.

Other blogs with more of a Vancouver connection ran Moveable Type. I’ve met John Gruber, David Shea, and probably Derek K. Miller. They all apparently used Moveable Type throughout the years. I think all of use were at the first Web Directions North.

Vox.com is still up, as is SixApart the company behind the technology that powered Vox still operates, but based on reading the above blog posts, they not like us.

Social Networking Retrospective

I wrote a lot about online social networks back in the day. I really should be more well known and more well off, but my MBA did not go well and I definitely purged a lot of people from my network and my life. They made it abundantly clear we were not friends, not even Facebook friends. If you have thoughts on friendship or social networking you can leave them below.

In 2026, I remembered this post. WordPress is slowly declining but only after becoming the dominant content management system on the entire Internet. The blogosphere as a whole has been in decline for a number of years. Some of us try to wage the good fight, but first there was the rise of the walled gardens and now super aps and AI built into everything is going to make it harder and harder to be a lone voice in the wilderness. The voices are still out there, the gatekeepers, the algorithms, and the benevolent dictators don’t want you to hear them.

The irony doesn’t end, Kevin Burton’s feedblog is gone and had Russian domain squatters on it when I revamped this old post about MySpace and social media, he moved his website to WordPress, but that too may now go unmaintained. Which takes us back to the original premise that Vox.com did not kill MySpace let alone WordPress and being a lone voice in the wilderness or the long tail is a tough row to hoe.

This entry was originaly posted on August 7th, 2006, it was last edited on May 31st, 2026 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, MySpace, Online Social Networks.