VOX shines
On a whim, I decided to sign up for a VOX account. The reviews have been pretty positive from around the web and for good reason. The ease of use, the sheer simplicity of the entire app is beautiful. Check it:
The signup is simple - you can see part of it here. The process actually starts by sending you an email first, which is not the usual process. It actually works pretty well and once you click to verify you get a very straightforward signup page. There are some really nice and unobtrusive details like the instruction box at the right…
…which follows from field to field giving you information about what they’d like you to put there and why you need it. A good example, on the postal code area they tell you they won’t share the information but it might be useful for the social aspect. Nice.
The library portion of VOX is slick. This has been on my wishlist for Wordpress for ages and the current set of WP plugins only get you part of the way there. The interface that Six Apart has created here is straight forward and makes excellent use of Ajax (using JSON!) to generate an interface that is responsive, allowing you to search for and add media items very quickly. In reality, this is a very part of the app, but it is very well done here. Six Apart allows you to hook into a number of other places like Flickr and photobucket and they promise more “conduits” in the near future. This is *excellent* because duplicating data is just silly - being able to grab a photostream right out of flickr to use within VOX just makes sense. I’m curious at the continued possibilities that open APIs will bring us - mashups are certainly just the beginning.
If you are already blogging you might not use VOX, but if you already haven’t jumped ship or hate myspace or blogger, then give VOX a try. It’s well worth it and you’ll notice the staggering difference in quality right away.
November 15th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Interesting! Thanks for posting this Rick! I had seen a few of the reviews of Vox, but having left MT behind long ago, hadn’t given SixApart’s new offering much thought. It appears that there are some solid ideas to learn from.
January 15th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
yeah, i always liked mt. i think SixApart does great work!