Site Review: Got Vox?
If one were to remove the ugliness from MySpace, add in the simplicity of Google as well as the rich features of Yahoo!, you would end up with Six Apart’s new kid on the block, Vox.
Vox, a mix between a social network and a weblogging service, appears to be Six Apart’s response to users less interested in the coding of the site and more interested in simply writing content and sharing it with others.
Depending on your point of view, Vox seems to be taking the “snobish” marketing technique by offering a small number of invites to the inside, which has been used too many times by Google, Yahoo! and now Microsoft’s Wallop.
For those of you who are lucky enough to stumble upon an invite (as they only gave me five) you may find it to be a refreshing place to share your thoughts, images, audio and video’s–as long as they are legal.
What makes Vox unique from other social networks is the ease of posting new content. Users can inside their WYSIWYG editor search and post video’s from YouTube and iFilm, or images from Flickr, Photobucket as well as a variety of other tools. Users can also search Vox to see what other users are talking about, and even check out recommended books.
An interesting note about Vox was the lack of a billion ads that now grace MySpace and others, although they may make a considerable portion of their income via books recommended by users linking to Amazon (not confirmed yet, but a suspician of mine).
Vox seems like a nice place to hang out, chat with friends and exchange info. But the question is, with so many other social networks out there doing the same, can Vox compete in a crowded market place?
I’m playing with VOX right now as a means to set up cool and easy system for all of my family members to stay in touch. I like it because with each post you make, you can control who gets to see it.
So far, it’s not cluttered with ads like MySpace but it’s still in private beta so we’ll have to see what happens once it goes live to the public. For now, I’m very pleased with it.