Behind the Curtain, Out of the Cupboard

I associate product releases with musical albums. Mostly because when I'm working on a product -- and especially during crunch times -- I will often play an album on loop for days on end. With Movable Type, the soundtrack was Melody Nelson and Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg. With TypePad, it was Elephant by the White Stripes (I broke up my problems into little parts just like that little squirrel). With Vox, the last couple weeks have been Nouvelle Vague's self-titled 80s covers album. The reason I bring all this up is because there's one song that is playing on loop in my mind: This is Not a Love Song, a cover of the PiL classic. It's got lyrics like:  "Not television / Behind the curtain / Out of the cupboard / You take the first train / Into the big world" and "Big business is very wise" (that's my loving nickname for a certain CEO of mine). It's the perfect song for today. Not only because the lyrics can apply to us right now, but because I keep on reminding myself that as far as we're concerned "this is not a launch."

This is not a launch. Vox is not feature complete. Six Apart and the Vox team are still working hard on the product, and we know we're got even farther to go. Think of this stage -- we're calling it a preview release -- as more of a groundbreaking, lifting the veil away from something we've been working on, for, well, a really long time. We're growing Vox slowly, by letting people in gradually through invitations and building a strong network of people. We're doing it this way to sure that the infrastructure scales. And we're doing it this way to make sure we get it right.

Many of the best aspects of weblogs and blogging software came about from the community helping refine the way things work. With Vox, we want to make that community feedback an explicit part of the development process. The team has learned that the more people that are in the service, the more we can learn how it should behave. Vox is part of something much larger -- a desire to try understand how people will want to blog in the future, even if they aren't blogging right now. And just like there was no official "start date," there is no official end date, but we are planning the official launch a few months out.

What does this mean for our other products?

Vox represents the first product that we've built on a platform that we call Meteor. The infrastructure is being applied to our existing products. Much of the backend infrastructure that powers Vox originated with LiveJournal and powers other massive sites like the Wikipedia and Slashdot. All our products share common APIs and leading up to the official launch we are working on integration projects that leverage each of our products core strengths. Vox is about introducing a whole new group of users to blogging as well as supplementing existing blogging platforms.

My roots are in personal blogging.

My first blog, dollarshort.org was all about my personal life: my childhood, my family, my daily interactions, etc... I loved blogging on dollarshort because I could tell stories. I wrote about my parents inventing a fake brother for me. I made up silly infographics. I wrote about my first boyfriend and my nightmare summer camp experience. I even podcasted in 2001! I could track my life and interact with people in a living room of sorts. And I found it increasingly difficult to write about my personal life with the same freedom and intimacy. I wrote all these difficulties in my my banjo post from July, 2004. It was then that I realized that having a public blog and a public persona and keeping the intimacy that made personal blogging fun was an incredibly difficult balancing act.

In the past couple months, as I've used Vox, I've started to feel like I did in 2001 when I first started dollarshort. The majority of my posts are "friends and family" and document my day. I write about my dog, Maddy, who we just adopted from a rescue foundation. I write about trips I go on and experiences I have. Most importantly, I write these posts for people who care about me and want to share their lives too. I haven't had to worry about who I might offend or some nasty comment that's will creep up. In short, personal blogging is really really fun again.

I don't think it's unfair for me to say that the "blogosphere" is often a hostile place. I said it in Paris and, although the speech is remembered more for the little blow up at the end, I stand by my statement that bringing new people to blogging is a good thing and unless we have a space where people can feel that they aren't going to get attacked, we will fail as an industry. People will debate whether the internet can be "nice." I'm still not asking for nice -- I'm asking for the acceptance of the same social norms we have in the offline world.

But back to Vox. Vox is about what makes us who we are; it about our lives, what we read, what we see, what we listen to and most importantly, who we choose to share it with. It's about having the option to write a post to reach thousands of people or two people. Since March, I've written about 60 posts on this blog. Most people will only see a fraction of that. And that's okay.

Actually, it's definitely more than okay, it's awesome. And, it's what most people are used to. Sometimes you only want your five best friends in the world to see a post, and you should be able to do that.

I'm really excited and proud of Vox. I'm proud of the team and Six Apart. This release represents a young product and we have a lot of growing to do. But, as far as the feeling of community we envisioned, we feel we got it right.