Beta-testing Vox

I've told you about Vox (previously known as Comet), and then told you that it wasn't that interesting after all.

Still, I promissed I would do a review about it as soon as I got my beta account, and since I have it now, here's a quick quick review.

Using it

It will have a really nice user experience, but for know it still has some presentation bugs. The social features are somewhat complicated, and non-experienced users might feel somewhat unconfortable using the app. As an example, let's try to find someone cool to add to my social network. Vox has the concept of "neighborhood", so I'll click there trying to find an "add more people to my neighborhood" link. No, not here, but here I have a link called "Neighbours" so let's try there. Not, not here. As a matter of fact, you can't "find new people", as it turned out. You can "Explore Vox" and look for books, videos, audio, photos and posts, but not for people. So, I searched for one tag, found nothing, searched for another and found a blog post. Clicked on that post, clicked on the guy's profile, and then saw "You're not connected to guy's nick (edit)". Had to click on edit to add him! Not so userfriendly.

The Pros

Vox has an excelent integration of concepts, and that turns your social network usefull and diverse. Using the integration with Flikr was great, and the way they just mix blogging with photos and music and books is... what you really need to create a social network that actual feels useful.

It also has a preety good use of tagging, an I'll try to explore that further.

The Cons

Blog posts are contents too, so I would expect that Vox would let me import my blogger's account content to Vox, the same what they let me import Flicker's stuff. I would use (and not just test) Vox if I could have integration with this blog: something like having an RSS reader showing the RSS of this blog instead of showing the blog I must have there would suffice.

But the thing that makes me more fearful about Vox is... censorship. If Six Apart is going to do with Vox the same thing they did to LiveJournal, this will be, then, a service to avoid.

Want more?

If you want to know more about Vox, I have some invites to give out. Just post a comment here asking one...