Do you still use your Pownce account? I stopped using mine months ago. I don't even know if I remember the password. If you do still use Pownce, the Twitter-like microblogging service that just never seemed to capitalize on its early hype, start preparing to migrate to something new. Today, Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, announced that it has acquired Pownce and will be shuttering the service in two weeks. Lead Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone will continue on at Six Apart, where presumably some of Pownce's features will be rolled into Vox.

Hey, at least there is Twitter! Seriously though, Pownce's failure is proof that hype alone will not make a product or company a success. As our own Nik Fletcher pointed out, Pownce is the perfect example of how NOT having a useful API at launch or soon thereafter is a huge mistake. Especially if you are trying to do the whole microblogging thing.

Not to get all Valleywag, but didn't Six Apart just lay off 8% of its staff, like three weeks ago? I don't know the particulars of either situation -- but simply on the surface, that's cold. Did something miraculously change or was this part of the plan the whole time?

If you are worried about losing your messages once Pownce powers down its service, the Pownce team has created an export tool which will generate a file (I'm guess its XML. I haven't had a chance to look at it) that can then be imported into Vox, WordPress or TypePad.

Fittingly, the discussion of Pownce's demise is much more active on Twitter and Friendfeed than on Pownce itself.

We've noticed various bloggers kicking around options for moblogging pictures. Some use Blogger, which has its own built-in moblogging options, while most others use something like WordPress, which doesn't have the most straightforward process for setting up a blog-by-email conduit. The one common thread among everyone one of these bloggers, however, seems to be that nearly every one of them has a Flickr account. If you're in this same bucket - wishing to moblog and using a service that doesn't have a moblogging flip to switch but you also have a Flickr account - you're in luck, because Flickr can serve as your one-stop hub for posting photos via email from a mobile device, while simultaneously auto-blogging each one at a wide variety of compatible services.

Fortunately, setting this all up isn't very difficult. All you need to do is log into your Flickr account, go to your account management page (click on your name/user name in the upper right) and then click on the Email tab. On that screen are two options: "Your Flickr upload email" and "Your blog upload email." As you mght guess, we're going to focus on the latter for now, and this Upload by email link might take you straight there. If you haven't set up any blogs to use with Flickr, you'll be prompted with a setup wizard that walks you through allowing Flickr to post to your blog (and a surprising amount of blog systems are supported, including Manila, Vox, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress and more). Once you have that all set up, you should see a dialog much like the one in this post, allowing you to chose basic image layouts for your Flickr-powered moblog posts, as well as whether Flickr should post any text in the body of your email as text in the blog entry. Flickr even allows you to add tags to your images when uploading via email, and it looks like those tags are stripped out when this is all converted into a blog post.

And there you have it - easy-breezy Flickr uploading + moblogging that doesn't require a fancy plug-in or PHP ninja skills.

Six Apart's community-focused Vox blogging service has been making a number of incremental improvements over the last month or two with minor updates to their software. New themes and other enhancements are all welcome additions, but two specific new features turned out heads enough for a mention.

First: the new Vox This bookmarklet. While Vox has been arguably way ahead of the competition by offering the best and most polished tools for blogging items from YouTube, Flickr and Amazon, they've never had a tool like Blogger's Blog This button that allows their users to easily blog things from virtually any site on the web. Finally, Vox This bridges this gap by offering a powerful bookmarklet users can click to instantly blog any site they're looking at, complete with the ability to scrape any selected text and even pictures on the page. The announcement post for this new feature also hints at an upcoming 'links library' feature for Vox, which sounds like it might add a simple linkroll functionality to Vox blogs that is powered by this bookmarklet.

The second major new feature to debut for the Vox community is a Digg This button at the bottom of every Vox post. The button acts just like you would expect, but the release notes that include this feature also instruct users not to get too comfortable with the button, for it will apparently soon turn into a full-fledged Share feature that opens the door for many more social bookmarking and news services. As with the hinted links library feature, we'll just have to stay tuned for a new announcement.

As they stand now though, these are exciting new features that bring some powerful web 2.0 community aspects to Vox, opening it up to the rest of the blogosphere even more, and making it easier for Vox bloggers to participate in the global conversations they're interested in.

iPhone day is upon us. Much has already been written about the iPhone despite the fact that only a handful of journalists have used it. One thing that is common among all reviews is the AT&T's EDGE network is slow. Perhaps it is faster now but EDGE is still no 3G.

Earlier this month at WWDC, Jobs told Apple's developers to develop web applications for the iPhone instead of releasing a SDK. Again, much had been written about how developers felt betrayed by Apple, and that web applications are not really applications at all. Despite all these resentments, a few iPhone only web sites have sprung up since WWDC. Unfortunately, none of them are particularly impressive or useful probably because no one has gotten their hands on a real iPhone yet, which kind of confirms what the developers feared; that web applications will not be as good as proper iPhone applications. There are exceptions, of course. NewsGator's online feed reader allows users to read their RSS feed via the web anywhere and sync with their desktop apps when they get home. Similarly, the latest version of Google Reader does the same.

With all the attention on iPhone only web apps, I think people are neglecting the regular web sites. Just because iPhone's Safari can render regular web sites fully and allows the users to navigate/zoom around the site with their fingers, it does not mean it provides the best user experience.

My prediction will be that as soon as all the new iPhone owners get home and start surfing to their favorite news site/blog/message board via EDGE connection, they will find that -- although they can do almost everything on that smaller screen -- it is not as easy as on the desktop computer. They will be disappointed and lots will be written on the web this weekend about how web surfing sucks on the iPhone using EDGE. And I will agree with them. Can you imagine loading and navigating cnet.com on the iPhone using EDGE?

So what can be done to improve the user experience? The solution is a concept that has existed ever since cell phones were able to connect to the internet; mobile versions of web sites. The idea of a stripped down version of the regular web site for a mobile phone is as old as HTML4/CSS2 themselves. Some of the best examples that I have used are Fandango, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vox. What is so good about specificly tailored mobile web sites? First, they are designed with cell phone in mind so the site is generally formatted to fit the narrower screens. Second, because of limited bandwidth mobile, they strip out all extraneous graphics, animations, AJAX menus and buttons, Flash, and the like. so the page will load quickly. Third, and the most important of all, because of the previous two reasons these sites always focus on what the users want to do on the site. Whether it is to find movie times on Fandango, updates your current thoughts/activities on Twitter or Facebook, or read/compose blog on Vox, these sites let users get there and do it quickly and pleasantly.

Some of the big players in the web are already there. Both Yahoo and Google have mobile version of their sites, allowing quick access to search, emails, and other features. BBC has a PDA version, so does CNN. As the battleground shifts from desktop to mobile computing, web sites need to start thinking about how their sites look on a restricted device (be it a UMPC, iPhone, etc.) because it is no longer just about providing content or services. It is about how easy the users can access these content or services.

My hope is that the iPhone will finally make web developers pay more attention to the mobile experience of their web sites. Even if iPhone 1.0 disappoints, at least other mobile web users will benefit from improved user experience.

While Six Apart offers an impressive service with Vox, their blogging community with a focus on 'neighborhoods', it could be argued that the service's doors are a little too closed. While Vox does unique things offering a streamlined registration system to help curb anonymous comments, one thing they don't have is any kind of API to allow access for things like external blogging clients. Sure, it's possible to email and moblog posts in, but it's hard to beat the power and flexibility that a full-on blogging client provides. A lack of an API also makes it difficult to cross-post from any other blogging system besides Six Apart's commercial TypePad blogging service.

That said, Pete Wood offers a bit of a compromise for WordPress users in the form of his Vox Crossposter plugin. Working with the constraints of having to send posts from WordPress via Vox's email system, this plugin will simply send your post - title, image and content - to your Vox account, though not without a few catches. First, none of your categories or tags come along for the ride. Also, your Vox post will more or less live independently from its sibling on WordPress; if you edit your WordPress post, your Vox one won't be updated (and if you aren't careful, it will be posted again unless you remember to tell the plugin to not crosspost the edit), and vice versa.

Still, Pete has done a good job with what Vox unfortunately gives him to work with. Our only request for now (until Vox gets in gear and cranks out an API) is that the plugin defaults to 'do not crosspost', since most posts probably aren't quite syndication material, and it would avoid those unfortunate double-posts.

Pete offers his Vox Crossposter plugin for WordPress free at his site.

Many years ago, car manufacturers emphasized only new features to entice new buyers. Then some time in the early 90's car safety became important and car manufacturers put safety features top of the selling points for new model.

I feel that right now Web 2.0 service providers are operating like those car manufacturers before the shift to car safety.

Ever since the infant days of the internet, people have been putting more and more data online (emails, newsgroup posts and IRC conversations) without giving it any thought. But in the Web 2.0 age we are leaving behind a trail of data much more personal than ever before. We tell people about our lives, our thoughts, and where we've been with our photos (some even tagged with geo-data).

With all the new and shiny Web 2.0 applications coming out, one may easily be convinced that desktop applications are breathing their last breath. At least that's what Google would like you to think about Google Apps, and its chances against rival Microsoft Office.

On the blogging front, most of the popular blogging systems (Blogger, Vox, TypePad, WordPress, etc.) have incorporated some degree of rich/WYSIWYG editor to make life easier for bloggers. Some of them integrate with other Web 2.0 applications (e.g. Vox with Flickr and YouTube, Flickr with blog systems) to allow users aggregate their disparate content. Does this mean the slow death of desktop blogging clients?

Vox, a Six Apart blogging community I admittedly am enjoying more and more each day, has just launched a few major new features, the most notable of which is Groups. Vox members can now create public or private groups for sharing anything you can already publish on Vox: posts, pictures, videos, books and more. Group owners can allows others to admin the group, and members can post either directly to the group or by clicking a button on content from their own Vox blog. I went through groups and added myself to a few before penning this post, and I can say that Vox thought this new feature through pretty well during development.


Below each post composition window now is an 'add to group' button, making it easy to publish content simultaneously to your own blog and any relevant groups. A minor gripe, however, is that they don't employ check boxes here; you can only click on one group at a time, though I don't imagine the greater majority will be adding too much content to more than one group at a time.


Also above all posts and other content on your blog (when you're signed in, of course) is a new 'add to group' button, keeping Organize panel (the admin area) visits to a minimum.

The other big feature in this new release is the much-requested ability to create custom banners for your Vox. A post on their new design.vox.com blog specifically designed to help users build the beest banner(s) they can has all the details, but basically: you can create a banner up to 940px x 200px in size, while anything smaller gets aligned to the bottom right. If this feature gets your creative juices flowing though, definitely check out the new Vox Design blog for all the info you need.

So far I love this new feature, though I must also curse Vox in the same breath for making such a cool community even cooler. Vox has been described as 'MySpace for the literate,' and I tend to agree. Pretty soon I'll be furiously refreshing my home page every chance I get, anticipating every new comment and message from readers and my Neighborhood. Thanks a lot, Vox.

Reuters is reporting that Cingular is set to announce a new partnership with MySpace today, offering a paid Java-based client on their phones with access to the popular social networking site. An extra $2.99/month will bring photo sharing, email checking, blogging and friend searching to about 90 percent of Cingular's handsets in the coming weeks. Video, strangely, won't be featured at the service's launch (strange because of Cingular's big push into video services as of late), but is said to be on its way some time in 2007.

Given that plenty of other social networking sites like Facebook and Vox offer mobile access and even download clients for free, this venture rubs me the wrong way. On the upside, however, MySpace is where I spend roughly .3 percent of my time (hey I have an account for the same reasons as everyone else: marketing myself), so I'll be happy to hang on to my $2.99, thankyouverymuch.

< I have to just come out and admit it: I've gone kookoo for Vox, Six Apart's step-ahead blogging platform and social networking service. They have done a better job than nearly any service I've seen (and believe me; we get our hands on just about everything web 2.0 here at DLS) at making it dead-easy to add audio, books, pictures and video to your posts from sites like YouTube, Flickr and Amazon.

Not content to making users sit in front of their computer all day, however, it looks as though Six Apart answered Jordan's request from back in August and released their mobile publishing client for Vox in a big way, and they even have a mobile site for staying on top of what's going on in your Neighborhood. I honestly don't know how long either of these have been around; I just noticed them while trawling their help files for goodies.

The mobile site is surprisingly functional, offering access to the QotD (Question of the Day), posts and media from your neighborhood, as well as a good portion of your administrative dashboard. The stand-alone mobile client for publishing - available for Windows Mobile 5, Palm OS and Series 60 1st/2nd Edition - is equally impressive. You have access to your phone's media and tools and the ability to customize just about every aspect of your posts; tags, visibility, the whole nine yards.

These two Vox goodies are impressive cross-platform offerings for such a new service (just recently out of beta), and I'm already getting even more hooked on Vox while away from my Mac. Thanks a lot, Six Apart.

Vox, the blogging-meets-social-networking site from Movable Type company Six Apart, has finally opened its doors to the public after several months of invite-only beta testing. I've been using Vox for a few months, albeit very lightly, but I must say that that as social networking and blogging sites go, it feels very stable and streamlined. In addition to all the tools you'd expect in a blogging service, Vox has lots of shiny tools like audio uploads, integration with YouTube and iFilm, Flickr and Photobucket, and Amazon, and an Organizer that makes it easy to manage all the audio, video, and photos you've added to your account. The social networking side of the service is like a more refined version of LiveJournal's, with a Neighborhood page that displays all of your contacts' posts and privacy controls to restrict who can read and comment on a post. It also comes with a ton of professionally-designed themes, and a lot of little touches that don't necessarily blow me away but do make me realize just how much thought was put into each part of the service. Vox is a free, ad-supported service, and I think that now that it's open to the public it's going to grow rapidly.

That famous and cutting edge blogging company SixApart, responsible for TypePad, Moveable Type, Vox, and LiveJournal today announces that it will gobble up social news aggregator Rojo along with Rojo's Nooz. According to TechCrunch, SixApart is planning to "sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months" (Barak Berkowitz, SixApart.com). We're guessing that means part of Rojo at this point. SixApart will continue to dash into the enterprise blogging fray, while Rojo remains a separate entity (for now) sans their leadership who will join SixApart. What will this mean for SixApart, and what about Rojo? Is this good for both? What do users of either service think? This will no doubt lead to greater integration in some way, but how? Sure, I have my own ideas, but after all 18 heads are better than one. Anyone care to speculate?

Ouriel Ohayon over at TechCrunch has the scoop on Vox (formerly known as Comet), a new hosted blogging platform from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal, which will be launching tomorrow. Ohayon describes Vox as "a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network" which features WYSIWYG editing, easy image, audio, and video uploading. Although the company already owns one of the largest and oldest social networks, LiveJournal, Vox seems to be Six Apart's round two bid against MySpace and other upstarts like TagWorld and AIM Pages. It will be a free, ad-supported service and blogs will prominently display a "Neighborhood," i.e. friends list plus other familiar features like Flickr and YouTube integration. For more screenshots of Vox, take a look at Ohayon's Flickr page.