A European company by the name of Skype taught the world that enabling people to make free voice and video calls over the Internet would be an enticing offer to hundreds of millions of users, and make for a great business at the same time. Now, a Euro startup called Vox.io plans to challenge them by envisioning how digital telephony should work in 2012 and beyond.

They provide a simple tool that lets people make free calls to other vox.io users from their desktop browser, or their iPhone (app link). But vox.io is not your traditional VoIP service, and on the Web requires no downloads or installations of any kind.

The startup, which hails from Slovenia, stands out because it has built its service to fit nicely into the current Web ecosystem, moving away from plugins, desktop apps and the like, with modern real-time and mobile communication trends squarely in the back of founder Tomaž Štolfa’s mind. Notably, the software is also designed from the ground up to play nicely with other Web services, and even allow in-stream access to third-party content (think Flickr photos or YouTube videso) in the future, too.

This differs from the path chosen by the likes of Skype, Viber, fring, JAJAH and Rebtel, mind you.

The company also focuses on simplicity and great design, and doesn’t shy away from experimenting when it comes to the business model, which is always a tricky thing for a telephony startup.

When you sign up for its service, you’ll get a profile URL like vox.io/name, which will serve as the central point of contact with the ability to replace your one or more telephone number(s).

You can use the online tool to place voice and video calls to other users, or call regular local and international regular lines for a fee. I tested it, and the call quality was outstanding. Vox.io also supports group calls of up to 5 people, and lets you easily import and sync your existing contacts.

The company plans to generate revenue from calls to traditional telephony and the delivery of SMS messages. Calls from one vox.io user to another will always remain free, but the company says it is exploring different ways to move away from charging users for minutes – one of its ideas is charging for ‘disposable call links’ that could last for, say, 14 days rather than a single conversation.

Basically, such disposable links could be shared with people you’re not necessarily close with but need to speak to all the same, and they would stop working after the call. No more deciding between giving out your phone number or not, in other words. On top of that, a vox.io/name profile also fits nicely on business cards, email signatures and on social network bios, and can rapidly be shared over SMS, IM, calendar events and whatnot. It’s like Skype for the Web generation!

I realize I’m raving, but I’m excited about this startup for a good reason – you’ll see what I mean when you use vox.io yourself. There are obvious things missing (support for other mobile platforms, instant messaging, more payment options to purchase call credits and more) but it’s already a stunning product for such a young Slovenian company operating on fairly limited resources.

Vox.io is backed by angel investors and renowned European startup accelerator Seedcamp; the startup won the Mini Seedcamp London event in January 2011 and was justifiably selected as one of the top startups at Seedcamp Week 2011. If what I’ve been hearing through the grapevine is accurate, the company will soon be announcing a significant additional financing round, though.

Give the vox.io beta service a solid whirl and let us know what you think.

Advertising network VideoEgg will acquire blogging and advertising network Six Apart, and the combined entity will be renamed Say Media. The companies will officially announce the transaction tomorrow. VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez will run the combined entity as CEO. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden will step down.

The SAY Media site will launch tomorrow, but we’ve included a screenshot of the home page.

Update: the SAY Media site is now live, and the news formally announced.

The combined company will reach 345 million global unique visitors, says the company. These are direct visitors to hosted sites as well as third party sites running ads from the companies. The combined company will have over 300 employees, and “the vast majority of Six Apart employees will move over,” says Sanchez.

There have been rumors that some of Six Apart’s flagship products will be shut down. The company is shuttering Vox this month, for example. But Alden says that Say Media will continue to support and grow the Typepad and Moveable Type platforms.

Update 2: introduction video:

Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.

What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens.

But it’s also that Vox is just pretty much a ghost town. The site has just 5.7 million monthly uniques, says Comscore. And if you really want to show family pictures to your friends, you’ll probably make the effort to just wade through Facebook’s privacy settings quagmire. As for private blogging, well, it just isn’t all that SEO friendly. WordPress ate their lunch, and they do private blogs, too.

We’ve put Vox into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Here’s a random software recommendation for your Friday afternoon enjoyment. It’s Vox, it’s for Mac OS X, and it’s a lightweight audio player. No, it’s not going to replace iTunes on your system—there’s no library feature, for one thing—but it’ll play some of the more obscure formats out there.

Right now (and for a few months now, going back to when it was called Tool Player), I use Vox to play those high-resolution FLAC files that I, uh, find on the Internet, as well as Ogg Vorbis files that have been popping up on a certain Sirius XM-related Usenet group of late.

Yes, you could use VLC to play these same files, but I have never been a fan of VLC (Or maybe it’s just that VLC for Mac is sorta icky?); I’m more an mplayer man when it comes to indie-cool multimedia players. Then, of course, I use Plex when I’m watching movies on the big screen.

I don’t know, I like it, and maybe you will too. Or not! Totally your call. But if you’ve ever searched for “how to play flac on mac os x” then Vox will do the job just fine.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

We know that the previous set of HTC Vox pics were, at best, blurry as hell. But thanks to the power of 3D product rendering photography, we now present to you the HTC Vox in all its glory.

In case you’re not up to date, this is the hot HTC jaunt that’s probably coming out for AT&T later in the year. It runs Windows Mobile Crossbow, has a 2-megapixel camera, a slide out QWERTY keypad, and WiFi.

HTX Vox Press Photos [BGR]

that looks like a direct successor to the Hermes and Herald line. Click the image for a bigger pic.

Now that Vox has finally launched after a long beta period and Multiply is coming out with new features and a new version, it’s a good time to ask…which one is better? If you’re looking for beautiful templates to chose between, a young hip crowd to network with and a company most likely to support emerging technology trends requested by early-adopter type users then Vox is the way to go. If you seek logical and robust privacy controls and shelter from an online world of strangers then Multiply is better designed. I prefer Multiply’s handling of media items and news feeds from your network of contacts. Vox is beautiful, Multiply is more functional.

Vox is the newest product of SixApart, owners of LiveJournal, MovableType and Typepad. Our previous Vox coverage is here. Multiply is privately owned and recently received $6 million in funding. Multiply is more than 2 years old and claims more than 3 million registered users.

Privacy Settings and Content Distribution

Privacy settings are the key issue according to both companies. Posts on Vox can be made visible to anyone, to just friends, to just family, to friends and family or just to you yourself.

Multiply allows more granular control: your friends, their friends and their friends, your family, their family and their family, your professional contacts, their professional contacts and their professional contacts, only direct contacts in either friend, family or professional contexts or only particular individuals added from contact lists importable from outside software. That’s quite a list of options and the interface makes it very workable. If you want to share something only with your family and their family, but not one more circle of family – well then I guess you’re out of luck. Sliders instead of check boxes could be useful.

Multiply says that there are many situations in which you’d like to share content with people one or two steps removed from your circle of contacts, but you don’t want to add those people to your contact list in order to do so. That makes sense to me.

In other words, if granular selective exposure is what’s important to you – Multiply is a better option than Vox.

Your Network News Feeds

The front page for Multiply users is now a feed of recent posts by friends and family. The page can be extended to include friends of friends and even further removed connections. The service uses a proprietary algorithm that includes how recently you’ve viewed someone’s posts and other factors to determine how close non-direct contacts are to you.

This My Multiply page is much cleaner and simpler than the cluttered Vox Neighborhood page and the all too similar but simpler VoxWatch page. As Facebook demonstrated, when you make the actions of friends visible on a user page – that’s something you need to do carefully. I prefer how Multiply aggregates that content, especially given that the original poster had such granular control over who it will be sent to.

A related section that displays a user’s friends uses the same algorithm to determine closeness and lets you hover over anyone’s image to see their relationship, send them a message or block them. (Example on the left.)

Media Handling

I prefer the way that Multiply works with multimedia, though there are some things like iStockPhoto integration for illustrating your writings that are nice about Vox. Both services allow users to upload photo and video from their computers or a number of online services. Vox transcodes videos, requires an annoying additional page load to view media files and I saw a big loss of quality when I tested Vox’s video handling. Multiply plays videos in Quicktime with no loss of quality but entirely outside of the original context it was posted in.

Multiply’s photo upload just got a major upgrade in version 3.0. The new Ajax uploader lets you reorder with drag and drop and quickly rotate images. It’s quite satisfying to use. Vox has better integration of photos into blog posts themselves, but the Ajax reordering in Multiply is frustratingly absent in Vox.

Multiply supports two-way cross posting with LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, Xanga and Windows Live Spaces. Vox only supports cross posting with LiveJournal and Typepad, both owned by SixApart just like Vox is. Multiply offers a screen saver you can download that will display the newest photos from any user you designate – that sounds like a good feature for family users.

Both services let you post by email via mobile phone, but with Vox you can get several different email addresses with different privacy settings. Mobile posting in Multiply is so bare bones I doubt it’s getting much use.

Rights Questions

Lately I’ve taken to framing questions about data export and identity standards as rights questions. I own rights on my data; I want to be able to easily and quickly take it with me from one social network to another. If I want to have a single login across those different networks and perhaps even have multiple personas (personal, professional) then I ought to be able to do so. No one is doing all of that well, but I expect consumers to demand all of it in time.

Multiply will burn you a CD with all of your data and mail it to you for $50. They say that the proof that data export isn’t something their users want is that only 1 person has taken that option in the two plus years it’s been available. I don’t consider that a very compelling argument.

Multiply also told me they were cautious about supporting Open ID standards, Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication or some other single login system because it could so easily go the way of Passport and fall into disuse. I think users should have a standards based single login as an option in addition to a native login. The company told me they were watching to see if one standard or another gains traction – but that’s what everyone says.

Some degree of persona support is available in Multiply, as I can expose some content to my family and other content to professional contacts. It would be good to be able to expose entirely different personal profiles, though.

Multiply does let me export my contacts as a CSV file. That’s a great start. Vox doesn’t support much in the way of these kinds of rights issues, but it just launched and SixApart’s Anil Dash tells me it’s all in the works. The company’s Live Journal property has been a trail blazer when it comes to ID issues. The Multiply team comes from the world of online sports sites and major media. They come from mainstream backgrounds and are targeting mainstream users. SixApart is a company of grass roots innovators, who seem to me more tied to the Web 2.0 community, and who are also targeting mainstream users with Vox. If you’re going to place bets on one of these two rolling out support for things like OpenID or microformats, Vox is the most likely to do so.

Conclusion

Both of these services, the leading privacy-centric multimedia sharing social networks, are not everything I wish they were. They are, however, both doing many things very well. Both are breaking new ground in a very young space on the web.

Both companies are likely to satisfy different kinds of customers. There are some ways they can’t be compared yet, too. For example, I love Vox’s understated advertisements. Multiply is running on VC backing and hasn’t launched a real ad strategy yet.

After looking at both of these systems in some depth, I feel all the more in agreement with the sentiment expressed in my recent interview with SixApart’s Andrew Anker – this sector is not just about MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, there is plenty of room still for more and better social networking services.

If you are looking to share text, photos and video with some control over who can see your content – these are two services you should check out. With the launch of version 3.0, I think Multiply has taken the lead.

In the following QandA I queried Andrew Anker, Executive VP of Corporate Development at SixApart, about some of the biggest criticisms of Vox at launch. Prior to working at SixApart, Anker was co-founder and CEO of Wired Digital and a general partner at August Capital. I think these questions and answers will be of general interest to startups and social social software practitioners in general.

Anker told me that he thinks the social networking market is far from saturated and that there is a market in protecting privacy even if people don’t use it. He says that software can be both feature rich and accessible to non-technical users; that the world of online advertising is just beginning to move beyond “punch the monkey” style ads and has lots more room to develop as well.

The following are Anker’s replies, I’ll let you judge for yourself whether they are convincing. Graphics below are from a few of the site’s more than 150 layout templates.

Marshall:
Some people have wondered whether Vox is Just Another Social Network – how close to saturated is the social networking market?

Andrew:
We don’t think it’s anywhere near close to saturated, which I think is mostly evidenced by the fact that all of the current services are growing quite nicely. We’re far away from the zero sum market share stage of social media where one company’s new customer is someone else’s loss. To make an analogy, we believe we’re in a similar stage as cable television was in the mid 1980′s. There have been a few breakout hits like MySpace and Facebook, but we’re a long way away from having a diverse set of properties covering all of the different market segments and customer use cases.

More importantly to Vox, we believe there is very little out there that is adequate serving the older, non “hooking-up” market. MySpace is great, but it’s not the best place to share pictures of your children with the friends and family you are closest to.

Marshall:
What evidence is there of strong demand for privacy-centric tools for personal expression?

Andrew:
The easiest example we have is our own Live Journal, which has 11 million registered users, but Flickr’s amazing growth in what was already a crowded photo sharing space has also done a great job of proving the need for privacy tools. And to be specific, we believe that more important than privacy itself is control… giving users the ability to decide who can see what. The fact is, the majority of posts and photos on Vox (like on Live Journal) are not private. But our customers need to know that they can make something private if appropriate. Create first, decide who can see if after.

The privacy issues that Facebook had a few months back were all about control. As has been much written about – see danah boyd for example. Facebook didn’t expose any new data when they made those changes. But they gave users less sense that they controlled their own data, which was the root cause of the user protests.

One of the founding principles of the Web 2.0 idea (per Tim O’Reilly) is that users control their own data. As far as we’re concerned, that applies both to the ability to move their data from service to service as well as the ability to be able to decide who can view it.

Marshall:
Why do readers have to be logged in to Vox to post comments?

Andrew:
That’s a temporary limitation that will be fixed over time. We are still in rapid iteration mode in developing the site and that was just one of those features that we didn’t get to before launch. In order to open comments to everyone, we need better spam moderation tools than we have currently. As soon as we have those in place, we will open the site to public comments. To be clear, much in the same way that Voxers can control within Vox who can comment (anyone, friends, family), this
will also be a user settable thing.

Marshall:
How has the Vox team strategized around offering something both feature rich and accessible to non-geeks? What could the future look like in regards to these issues?

Andrew:
Building good usability is about doing thousands of small things right and balancing out feature rich with accessible to non-geeks is part of that process. Very early on in Vox’s development, we created a two week rapid iteration cycle where we made sure to push code religiously every two weeks. By doing that, we made sure that we were building a design cycle that was always two weeks away from fixing any problem.

We have Hitbox instrumented all over the site, an internal usability lab, a great support team reading all site feedback and a passionate group of developers who are also big Vox users. We are constantly
listening to both the implicit and explicit data we’re seeing on the usability side and constantly tweaking the site to make it friendlier.

Marshall:
The advertising on Vox is remarkably subdued and that’s great for users. Some people felt burnt, though, when LiveJournal recently introduced sponsored communities and features. Do ads on admin pages, modest public facing ads and affiliate revenues from partner sites have the potential to convert sufficiently or will Vox crumble and add flashing banners after a few months?

Andrew:
We’re certainly working hard to balance the needs of Vox users with advertisers and don’t believe that the audience we’re going after responds well to flashing banners and “punch the monkey” type messaging. Obviously we’re a business and need to make money. But we don’t see making money and doing advertising right as two mutually exclusive concepts.

As was announced last week, we’re working closely with our advertising partners to make sure we do it right. As early as social media is, we believe advertising on social media is even earlier. We are very confident that we can help it develop as one of the most effective media out there.

The service developed a reputation among some people during its beta period as a social network for artsy San Francisco elitists – but everyone needs a beta testing group and that’s a pretty good one to have. Vox was originally known as Comet and we first wrote about it here.

Besides all the basic features of a social networking site, Vox includes extensive privacy controls, a tag cloud for blog posts and a beautiful WYSWIG composition page. Privacy levels are a big part of the company’s strategy, Meena Trott in particular has been talking for some time about how the future of blogging will be found in small, closed groups communicating with each other online.

Profile pages can’t be edited directly at the code level, but there are a number of layout options and more than 165 sharp looking themes. There’s also easy mobile browsing and posting. Media elements can be placed into Vox pages with ease and the site integrates with YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, iFilm and iStockphoto. Several of these are competing companies and it’s great that they are all available to users. IStockPhoto would have seemed like a strange choice to me had I not met the company yesterday and seen that their work is actually very community oriented and interesting.

One of the things that users are going to love about Vox is that the advertising is incredibly unobtrusive. The business model here looks really smart. There are large sidebar ads only on the admin pages, search results and a few others, it’s great. You can view profile pages and explore the site without looking at big ads! There are a few very small ads in public user pages and users are encouraged to post about their favorite books and movies. Those can be purchased by readers through affiliate links that Vox will monetize as well. I talked to Six Apart’s Anil Dash and he says the advertising is going to basically stay the way it is.

There are a few things I wish were different about Vox. The fact that clicking on a Flash media player takes you to a different Vox page with little else on it is very counter intuitive. If support for microformats was offered and done as well in Vox as other things are, that would be great. I’d also really like to see OpenID support and easy import/export of user data. Dash told me that they support OpenID as a server today (you can leave comments in LiveJournal as yourname.vox.com for example) and will be adding full client support for OpenID login soon. Dash said the company is working on a number of things to make export easier.

Overall, though, I think that Vox looks great at launch. It’s obvious that it was built by an experienced team who have been paid attention to how the market is developing and what people want in a social network. It’s uniquely easy on the eyes and I wouldn’t be surprised to see people flock to it. There are hordes of people dying to get out of MySpace and as general interest social networks go Vox looks like a very appealing alternative.

Vox was initially introduced last fall at a DEMO conference (click here for details and a video archive of Mena Trott’s presentation).

Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags.

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.

Vox will be free and advertising supported.

More screenshots here.