About a month ago I dropped by Six Apart to check out their new Vox blogging service. It's built on the guts of livejournal, but with a cleaner, more modern, look and feel. It has a much easier user interface. Decked out in a Kermit-green scarf and shoes, Mena Trott walked me through its feature set, and at the time it made perfect sense.

It's basically a foray back into Six Apart's roots--personal blogging as a way of staying connected with friends and family. The changable themes are more like clothes than the perfectly designed architecture. The layers of password protection, while not as perfectly customizable as livejournal, make it pretty simple for people to share pictures and personal anecdotes with various groups in their lives without opening them up to the world, working much the same was as flickr's friends and family settings. And the site comes preloaded with activities. It reminded me of a creative writing workbook, except it was a creative blogging stimulator. The whole point is to stimulate discussion, but in a safe and protected zone. The nicest feature is that you can't see that there is password protected material that you can't access--it's just not there, so you don't feel excluded. I went home and started handing out invitations to the friends that I normally communicate with via personal list server, endless gmail threading, and carefully password protected photo albums. Maybe we would finally find a one-stop shop to our quest for private, group communication.

A lot of these tools seem to have as their foundation the idea that people should blog, and the creators of these tools want people to blog. When Mena described the various widgets that are meant to inspire creativity--the question or meme that the Vox staff posts daily, for instance--it seemed like she took it for granted that encouraging people to blog was almost a good in and of itself. Of course Vox is going to rely on carefully targetted advertising revenue, but the market being envision is clearly one in which blogging is a vibrant, daily part of life and culture. Anil Dash has emanated this sensibility since I first met him in 2004. At the recent Word Camp, Wordpress leader Matt Mullenweg asked the audience, "How can we get more people to blog?" The discussion invariably led to "How do we get my mother to blog?" (A mother grumbled that she was tired of "my mother" always being the example of the technologically naive.)

But my experience with vox leads me to guess that it is perfect for mothers and for teenagers and children, but will only be a passing fad for all but the grittiest early adapters among the 20-and30something set that is the ostensible target for all new technologies. Like a lot of social networking technologies, it works best if your social network is either fairly static and stable or you are wiling to devote an awful lot of time to keeping track of it. The latter describes the teenage Myspace set. . The next generation in between---my generation--is to fidgety to stick to any static list of "friends" and "family" for very long. The passionate revelations they want to make to A, B, and C today they will, tomorrow, forever want to hide away from C. Any technology that requires you to maintain static, knowable lists will eventually tire you out. The invitations dribble out too slowly to build a critical mass from existing friends, and the privacy features make it hard to make new friends. A month later, my vox neighborhood has withered.

My friend Robin Sloan once pointed out to me that a child's blog performs an ideal function for parents, constantly pinging them--"Your child is ALIVE." The real target here are the moms and dads and grandparents who are forming America's first real generation of connected clans, reclaiming a culture of extended family via the internet that 200 years of moving and pioneering withered away. I don't really have that kind of clan available to test on, but my insight from Vox is that there will be a big market for smart social networking--or family networking--aimed at older people with stable relationships.