Six Apart to Compete With Social Networks

Posted on June 1, 2006

TechCrunch reports that Six Apart is launching a free tool called Vox (formerly Project Comet) that combines social networking and blogging.

There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called "neighborhood" is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.
Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want -- integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages.

The Demo site says competitors of Six Apart's new blogging tool include Google's Blogger, Yahoo's Yahoo! 360 and Microsoft's MSN Spaces. You can learn more about Vox here. Six Apart says Vox will open later this year. It is currently being tested by a few thousand people according to the TechCrunch post. This tool obviously competes with all the other social networks that offer blogging tools, like MySpace. The free blogging and social networking services market has become very crowded. The good news is there are lots of free options for web users to choose from.