I just had my first look at Vox which was launched only five days ago on June 1. It's free like Blogger and looks a lot better and offers a lot more choices. Naturally, since it comes from the people behind TypePad which is any day better than Blogger. But Ben and Mena Trott are not in the habit of giving away their goodies for free. What gives? It carries advertising such as Google Ads. But it's tastefully done. The blogs I saw had ads at the bottom of the page.
Vox is being described as a free blog cum social networking site. In other words it's more like MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 but it looks better than MSN Spaces and has another similarity with Yahoo 360. At the moment, you have to be invited to start using Vox.
TypePad says: "Later this year, we expect Vox to be open to anyone who wants to join. Right now, we're limiting the number of participants to make sure the service performs to our standards. Please let us know if you are interested in becoming a member. When we're ready, we'll send you an invitation."
I first read about Vox yesterday in Bloggers Blog which linked to a report in Tech Crunch. The report said:
"Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags.
"There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called “neighborhood” is prominently displayed on each page. If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.
"Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want - integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages."
It may be for newbies but it is damn goodlooking.
One should look at Vox to get a better idea of it. And watch a sweet little video where Mena says it's meant for people like her mum who have never blogged. The video shows Mena, her mum and Ben. Only they don't call it Vox in the video, they use the code name of the project: Comet. Vox sounds better. And it looks cool.
