If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that for a long time I’ve been a big fan of Ben and Mena Trott and the awesome products they, and the team at SixApart, create. That’s why when the beta testing for Vox, their latest project, was announced I signed up immediately. Last night I received my invite to try Vox and here’s the scoop:
1) It’s social or it’s not. That’s right. You choose who sees your posts. Like Flickr you can choose if you want your posts to be public, friends and family, or private. Great if you want to show your friends something but not the whole world.
2) It’s fun. Skinnable. No themeable (is that a word). Changing your theme is as easy as clicking the mouse. No more diddling with templates. Oh, don’t worry, there are a lot of themes to choose from and Mena said on Inside the Net they were planning on adding more.
3) Robust. You hear that word a lot when describing stuff on the web but I’m gonna admit, Vox is about as robust as you can get. Writing a post and you want to add a picture? Great! Click the picture button and you’re given the option of uploading, finding one on your flickr account, getting one from your photobucket account, or getting one from iStockphoto for free (has watermark on it and links back to site). Amazon? Same thing. Add a book from amazon.com no sweat. There’s a button for it. Books, audio, coolections, all the same. Couldn’t be simpler. And the User Interface is rich and easy to use.
4) Community. Take a look at what other people are posting (public) through the explore page. What a great way to make friends. Posts also come with tags so you can search through related entries from others who have used the same tags in a matter of seconds. What a great way to learn more about a topic.
5) Free. At the moment Vox is being paid for by ads relative to content. This means for such a robust service your price is…$0. Awesome.
So overall what do I think about Vox, I think it’s fabulous. I think Ben and Mena have made something awesome and I can’t wait until they open it up to the public.
(Note: Please don’t ask for invites at this time. I was only given one and it’s gone already. Thanks.)