14 posts tagged “vox”
I signed up for Renkoo, the new, supposed Evite killer currently in beta. As always, I did so using Safari in part because I prefer an extremely fast and seamles user experience and partly because of a masochistic and nostaligic desire to relive my days as a Netscape user being told that my browser isn't supported.
True to form, after logging in, I got this message (emphasis is mine):
Even if we are not able to fully support your browser, you will be able to see and use all of the site except for Invites. This is because we employ an advanced technology called Comet on the Invites page.
An advanced technology called Comet? Renkoo is supposedly all Ajaxy like Vox, whose original code name was Comet. Is Vox's lack of Safari support haunting me?!
Oh the delicious irony...
MySpace.com wants Apple Computer to update its QuickTime media player software so it can't be used in attacks on the social-networking site.
The request comes after a worm in the form of a rigged QuickTime movie crawled onto MySpace.com over the weekend, changing people's MySpace profiles. The worm spread because of QuickTime's support for JavaScript code, experts have said.
Those are some intrusive ads... *sigh*
From the Wall Street Journal and Walt Mossberg: Choosing Who Can See What on Your Blog:
Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging. Its designs are attractive, but it really shines when loading media onto your posts, making your blog richer in content and more sophisticated in looks. Updates will continue to be released, improving Vox's weaknesses, the most important of which is clarifying its group labels. Vox also plans to offer to import your content from other blogging sites, encouraging experienced users to bring their last blog along with them instead of leaving it with the old service.
Good article... Now hopefully someone in my family will see it and get excited about Vox instead of continuing to use that awful MyFamily.com which hasn't added a feature since about 2003... Blecch...
Mena gets interviewed by Wired on Vox. Personally, as someone who put almost the entirety of their last two years into it, I take great pride in this part:
Movable Type right now is doing incredibly well. We just released the Movable Type enterprise product. We have a new general manager for it, Chris Alden, who founded Rojo. We're putting a huge amount of investment into that.
Publicly blogging about private assets is in poor taste... UNLESS IT'S A DELICIOUS VOX LAUNCH CAKE!
So I just found out that the downside of the stripped down WYSIWYG editor is that you can no longer type links into the comment textarea. What's more, the link icon doesn't even show up if you're using Safari.
So before, whenever I wanted to write a post, I had to open up Firefox. Now whenever I want to comment, I have to do so as well.
As someone who lives in Safari all day, I can honestly say that sucks...
Following up on my previous post, what's wrong with this picture? (The red lines are obviously your hint...)
Is anyone else bothered by this or is it just me?
When I posted this, there were three things going through my mind:
- Wow! People really love Vox and are so creative and productive!
- Holy crap, I'm skipping over a lot of stuff just to make sure I read the stuff that's important to me
- Vox really needs a better consumption system
Working for Six Apart and loving Vox so much that it's killed my personal blog, I don't want people to stop posting. If anything I want them to post more. Having more content is the only way to know whether you enjoy reading someone's posts. More content equals more good content (also more bad), but often the cream rises to the top and allows you to separate out the wheat from the chaff. In the end, it allows you to get what you came for.
Part of the problem with being on Vox since the absolute very beginning before it was even public is that I (and we all) added everyone we could to our neighborhood because at the time, there were only like 200 people to read. Then 400. Then 1600, etc etc etc. What that means is that my neighborhood is bloated with people I don't even know and whose posts I don't find really relevant. That's no slight on them, it's just the way we work. I need to pare down, pure and simple. No tears, no heartbreak. Fact of life.
The main reason I have to pare down is because I have missed things I really wanted to see from my friends and people I find interesting (yes, even you Mike Monteiro, King of VOX). That is bad. Vox (and Six Apart products in general) is about connecting with the people you care about. If a party is so crowded and noisy that I can't find and connect with the people I care about, it's not much of a fun party, is it?
Which brings us to the main thing that I've been saying before Vox even started: Vox needs a better consumption (and also privacy) system. Let me explain:
- Adding someone to your neighborhood allows you to enjoy their content regularly
- But when your neighborhood gets too big, how do you filter?
- Friends? No way! My friends designation is solely for privacy in posting.
- Just because I really like to read someone else's posts does not equate to a desire on my part to have them read my personal posts.
So what that means is that there is one group for reading and only one group: Neighborhood. That's not enough. While I may want to read everything from everyone in my entire neighborhood one day, on another, when I'm much more busy, I want to be able to just read the most important. And again, the "most important" content to me is not always my "Friends" or "Family".
Related to this is the posting privacy layers: Friends and Family. The obvious problem with that is that I don't have a group called "Friends" that I want to communicate with. I have 23 groups of "friends" (or more appropriately, "people") with whom I would like to communicate some things with.
One of the beautiful things about Vox is that I can post things to a smaller group of people, but the need for segmentation is greater than just two standard groups with overloaded labels. I need to be able to select people to communicate with, either individually, in bulk in an ad hoc fashion, or by creating a custom group that I can use later on. This would allow me to communicate very precisely with those people I wish to do so with. When Vox has this, then email is even more dead to me than it is now.
So those are my problems with our current system of reading and writing on Vox. Luckily, we've got a lot of smart and passionate people on the Vox team and they already know all of this stuff. There's a reason we're still in Beta and I'm sure that by the time we do a public launch, we'll have put all the pieces together.
So don't feel bad for posting. That wasn't my point. This Vox is your Vox, this Vox is my Vox. It's incumbent upon the Vox team to make the best product they can, and I know they will...
They are good. Go see them and the dogs that inspired them.
