Vox Non-Launch Party

I got invited Thursday night to a party for Vox. Invitation-only parties are weird. I’m not used to feeling like the in-crowd, so my out-crowd mentality always makes me feel vaguely guilty. But after I got over that, it was a good evening.

I’d say Vox is basic LiveJournal aimed at an older audience. It’s a blog for people who hear blog and think “Oh, those things that the newspaper keeps mentioning as bad for business and the cable news is so scared of.” People who don’t want to share pictures of their kids with random internet strangers but find their cc list getting unmanageably long. Vox is a blogging site with a surprisingly nice user interface, the first I feel I can recommend to my mom without signing up to do a few hours of tutoring and answering questions.

It really is nice. Six Apart clearly learned a lot from LiveJournal and thought hard about how to make a blogging service to let you bring your relationships with family and friends online with minimal weirdness. Vox is not trying to be an engineering triumph, it just is a user interface triumph.

All is not roses, of course. They’re not fully launching until roughly October. You have to join an announcement list to get an account, I got the impression they’re adding a batch of a couple thousand people every few weeks. The site simply doesn’t work in Safari yet, and IE is iffy. There’s no public bug tracker, so I can’t even guess at how many features are missing or broken, so I can’t recommend anyone sign up until the launch in a few months. Also, if you happen to know any hardcore LiveJournal fans you’re in for a rant about how Six Apart wants to destroy LJ and Vox is some kind of weapon in this covert campaign.

The party was one of a series Vox is doing before launch ostensibly so that Vox doesn’t just grow out of California like most social websites. There was a blurry demo, open bar, and around fifty people at the MCA. I enjoyed chatting with four of the Six Apart employees present (out of seven or so) and around a third of the other guests.

I look forward to seeing launch, and web developers should learn from their very nice blog posting interface.

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