As a member of the Sixapart Professional Network I was lucky enough to get my hands on an invite to Vox.
SixApart are the people behind Typepad and Movable Type, so they know about blogging.
They may not have made too many friends in the past with their licensing, but that’s all changed…
In any case Vox is what it’s all about.
So what exactly is Vox?
In many ways it’s Six Apart’s answer to free blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com (not to be confused with the software that powers this blog)
At present membership is by invitation only so, in common with a lot of these web 2.0 type services they’re taking a leaf right out of Seth Godin’s book(s) and building it up using an idea virus.. Or maybe they’re just getting us all to beta test it for them.. It doesn’t really matter, as the service is really cool.
Once you login you get to see what a slick blogging interface is all about.
You can, of course, customise your public profile as much as you want. Once you select your timezone the system should reflect your choice in your settings..
I posted twice to my Vox powered blog just to see what it was like – once via the web interface and once via email (which was so easy to do that it was laughable!)
If you have a look at my extremely basic blog you’ll notice a number of elements that are quite different.
While other blogs have “blogrolls” the paradigm is shifted to the concept of “neighbours” and extended to include “friends” and “family”.
You can set access levels to most elements according to your relationship with the viewer / reader. So a friend would automatically be able to see more intimate details than a complete stranger.
Unfortunately at present there doesn’t seem to be any way to link to a blog outside the Vox platform / network, which is a little bit annoying.
Bloggers like to be able to “connect” with each other, so this limitation bugged me, but I expect they’ll add that functionality later.
You also have no way of adding custom HTML snippets either…
At the interface level it is truly impressive.
One thing that impressed me time and again was the speed of the interface. No matter what I was doing, be that uploading files from my pc or pulling in content from 3rd party services it was fast.
When it comes to controlling media Vox really runs rings around the competition.
For example, if you want to add a photo to a blog post you are presented with a range of options.
You can choose from the “classics” ie. uploading from your computer or grabbing from your Flickr account. However the Vox team have taken it a step further. You can also grab content from other sources such as iStockPhoto and PhotoBucket. Just for a laugh I added an image to a post which I pulled in from iStockPhoto and was chosen based on a keyword search. I was then able to resize it and choose where to place it in the post – all via a nice and intuitive AJAX powered interface.
As you add more media to your “collections” you can choose how to manipulate them both via the sidebar or within your posts. It’s really nifty!
What is quite novel about the whole thing is the permissions aspect, which I already mentioned, – you can decide who sees what and how they may interact with it. So instead of password protecting posts or closing comments etc., you can simply decide which users are allowed to view them etc., which is nice
All in all it’s a very nifty platform which is nice and easy to use. For someone like me, however, I’d probably get bored very easily, as I like to be able to control as much as possible. The links to Amazon and adsense ads, for example, are not configurable and so use the Vox accounts.
I’ve no idea what they plan to do with Vox as it is rolled out, but if a “pay to use” option were available which allowed you to get the ad revenue I could see it becoming popular.
However you shouldn’t forget that Vox is currently in development.
I was lucky enough to get to play with a preview of what is going to be a really tasty and extremely powerful platform.
Watch out WordPress – Sixapart is back!
“Unfortunately at present there doesn’t seem to be any way to link to a blog outside the Vox platform / network, which is a little bit annoying.
Bloggers like to be able to “connect” with each other, so this limitation bugged me, but I expect they’ll add that functionality later.”
Don’t bet on it. A LOT of these ‘community’ sites are very much a walled garden.
Rob – I would presume that they’re trying to put together a platform that can compete with the likes of blogger and wordpress.com….. If that’s the case I’d expect to see them add more functionality to facilitate linking etc., If that’s not the case then I’m not sure how they will be able to convert people from other solutions..
MySpace and Bebo have done well enough… They may be targeting that vector.
It comes across as a hybrid social networking and blogging platform. Whilst not my cup of tea, I think this is going to be a huge success in the late-adopter market. Every feature is clearly designed to be as easy to use as possible.
One drawback of this approach is that they have “raw HTML” editing as a very low priority to implement. Not only that but if you blog by email/phone, they strip out all the HTML markkup and they strip all of the marked up content!
I’m currently looking at their ATOM Publishing support to see if they do the same thing there. If they do, then I think it is a big mistake as it artificially limits what your users can do for no obvious reason. MySpace does not have that limitation. Oh OK, MySpace doesn’t have an API either but that’s another days conversation.
Played well, Vox could become what PeopleAggregator wants to be – an open, extensible platform where people can interact and use/create content and identity to/from a multitude of other sites. Played badly, it’ll just be another walled garden desperately trying to attract the kiddies.