Six Apart Dumps LiveJournal: What's Next, Vox?

Well, they are finally headed in the right direction: Six Apart has sold one of its inexhaustible supply of blogging soutions -- in this case LiveJournal:

[from Six Apart - News and Events: Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal]

Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has established an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

I never understood the acquisition in the first place, just like I never got the reasoning for building Vox, instead of building on Typepad or Movable Type.

This is promising: maybe they can focus on building some real innovation into their mainstream products, and do something materially constructive for their many eager customers.

Next, they should find someone in China to buy Vox, and then they can get down to business.

Comments

[Adam Kalsey]

I suspect that the LJ acquisition was a) cheap at the time and b) a way to buy some serious scaling expertise.

[Matthew]

Nice succinct insight, which I cited, in part, in a recent post. Every month or so we do a "Departures and Arrivals" post, and this LiveJournal thing made for an interesting "Departure." I'm wondering if you have anything to add to the post in the way of Arrivals? I'd love to read your thoughts. Here's our post, Daylife Blog: Departures and Arrivals. Care to flesh it out a bit? Thanks.

[phil jones]

Weird, isn't it? You'd think that the logical thing to do would be to buy LiveJournal for the community, then work hard migrating the back-end TypePad with different templates. Is this an admission that Six Apart don't want the cost of the LiveJournal community itself? Or is it a failure of that project to merge the software?

From the press release it sounds like the software was already being maintained and forked by SUP so may be that's the reason that the software wouldn't / couldn't be merged - but it smells like a surprising admission of failure.

[Stowe Boyd]

Adam - You may be right, but the argument at the time of the acquisition was more grand, like learning the secrets of LJ communities and applying them to a new generation platform. Which was Vox, which is a big fizzle.

[Stowe Boyd]

Phil - Exactly. I guess it's a sign that they don't want to be bothered with whatever is necessary to grow LJ internationally. Let's hope it means they are going to stick to the knitting and do something big with Typepad and MT.

[Ivan Pope]

They bought Livejournal because they could. Nothing more. They never had any ideas of what to do with it - but I think they had a touch of megalomania at the time.
As for VOX, it's quite a good platform. But poor old TypePad, which is my original platform, it's left in the dust. It's a good solid platform that is overcomplex and hasn't innovated anything since they rolled out their widget platform. What they really need is a better way of managing the blog - something that Wordpress majors on!