Vox review
I've been playing around with Six Apart's newest blogging application, Vox. I'm not in the market for something like this, but it's definitely a step up from LiveJournal and I'd recommend people switch once it's publically available.
In a nutshell, Vox is a Livejournal-like blogging and social networking application. You get the blog and friends lists you get with LJ, plus photos, videos, a book list, and unified tagging and organizing across all different media types. Photos, videos, and book lists are integrated with Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, and more, which makes things even easier. Unlike LiveJournal, you also get human readable URLs so links make much more sense.
Notably missing are trackbacks/pingbacks, but as this is in beta I expect they'll show up eventually. Ditto for some of the clunkiness of the media selector.
One of my original questions about Vox was why it exists at all, why Six Apart didn't just expand Livejournal's feature set until it matches what they're doing here. I thought this might be an indicator that the LJ code base is already pushed as far as it can be and so it was actually easier to start from scratch than to shoehorn more functionality into LJ. After looking around Vox a bit more I now suspect that isn't the reason, but that they want to create something a little more upscale and didn't want to be burdened with the baggage that's attached to the Livejournal name. Time will tell, I suppose.
Vox is still in limited release beta. Accounts are given apparently at random to people who sign up on Six Apart's site.
Edit: Apparently you can't post in HTML, but have to use a JavaScript-powered toolbar to do something as simple as create a link or bold text. There may be an option somewhere I missed, but forcing something like is a pretty big annoyance. Hopefully this is something that will be fixed before the final release.
Edit 2: And it seems the link generator doesn't yet work all that well. The first line of this post is supposed to contain a link to www.vox.com, but while the text is a different color, it's not a clickable link. The second link in this post works fine. This is reproducable; I tried to fix it only to get the same result. Upon viewing the source, I find the reason. The link source lost the href attribute and still has a temporary id:
<a id="temp_id_for_retrieving_inserted_element_15">Vox</a>
Whatever happened to letting people post in plain old text?
Comments
I think they might not have wanted to do a lot of this stuff, to avoid pissing off LJ users xD They've been pretty annoyed with the updates so far.
You think they didn't want to piss off LJ users by giving them more features?
Unrelated: What does "this is good" mean?
A lot of LJ users are pretty resistant to change, or "becoming MySpace" as this actually looks quite a bit more like.
Well, mostly it's just approving of what's written- I believe I read in one of their posts that it's also for when you want to comment approving of what's written, without the pressure of thinking up something clever or meaningful to say.
Well, I guess that's understandable, the Myspace ghetto is far, far worse than the Livejournal ghetto.