A voice to more personal bloggers
Mena Trott and Andrew Anker
President and executive vice president, Six Apart Ltd.
Despite such competitors as Google Inc.'s Blogger and Microsoft Corp.'s Spaces, a tiny San Francisco company called Six Apart Ltd. has not only survived but thrived as a leading maker of blogging software. Six Apart's Movable Type is the software of choice for professional bloggers worldwide, its LiveJournal software has about 11 million users, and its TypePad program also has millions of users. Six Apart president and founder Mena Trott and executive vice president Andrew Anker recently spoke with Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray.
Q. You just came out with another blogging system called Vox. Who needs it?
Trott: There's this huge group of people who are bloggers, and they just don't know it yet. They're the communicators in their family. They're the one that sends the family newsletter once a year. They're the ones who take the pictures of the family gatherings. Those people tend to be the ones who are not represented online.
LiveJournal is the closest thing we have right now to Vox. But LiveJournal is too hard to use. It was meant for the hacker type. That does not appeal to people like my mom.
My mom is 49 years old. She works as an admin, and she uses computers daily. She knows how to use Excel better than me. She doesn't want to blog. She doesn't feel like she has anything to say.
But at the same time, she e-mails me constantly, she forwards me pictures of dogs. What we're trying to do at Vox is say, ``You're communicating already; you just don't have the best way to do it."
Q. Why is Vox a better tool than, say, TypePad?
Trott: Vox is about -- community, sharing, and not necessarily publishing. It's not about 600 people; it's about six people.
Q. Vox also lets users seal off some parts of the blog and display others?
Trott: Roughly 25 percent of the things on Vox are made private. The rest are made public. People are still blogging publicly, but they like the control of feeling they can blog privately.
Q. How is this different from a social networking service like MySpace?
Trott: You see where on MySpace, someone will say they have 30,000 friends. I don't want a lot of friends. I'm happy with the 10 friends I have.
Anker: For the audience we're going after, which is over 25, they tend not to be looking for more friends. For the most part, it's much more about sharing the things you care about with the people you love.
Q. Vox seems far easier to use than your other blogging tools. Was that a key goal of the designers?
Anker: People don't have a lot of time. They spend all day in front of a computer. The last thing they want to do is go home and spend six more hours on a computer surfing for friends. But they do want to come home and see what their cousins have done, see what their nephews and nieces have done.
Q. How will Vox make money?
Trott: Vox is going to be an ad-supported product. We want to do it in a way that's tasteful and not in your face. We make affiliate fees from Amazon. If someone writes a music review, and someone clicks on it and buys it, we get a portion of that revenue from the sale. We find with the ads right now on Vox that people don't mind them at all, because they say, well, Vox has to pay the bills.
Anker: Advertisers are losing their audience. The ads are leaving the existing places like TV and newspapers, and they're moving into social media.
Q. Six Apart's been around for five years now. Are you making money yet?
Anker: We are generating revenue. We are not profitable. We believe we will be pretty soon. We're not going public anytime soon. We're very happy as a small, private company.
Q. You're up against Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. How will you survive?
Trott: That's been the case for five years, and I think we've stayed far above them. The same time we got funded was the same time Google bought Blogger. We can clearly say our products are better than Blogger.
How can a company that's smaller than Google make a better product? It's because it's our core focus, for one thing. We're a blogging company. We don't try to pretend to be anything else. And, we're innovating. Yahoo 360 or Microsoft Spaces, they've put features in that we basically invented. We just don't think that any of those companies out there have that insight or the desire to be number one in blogging.
