I am a Vox Addict

Last Thurday was the official launch of Vox, Six Apart's latest amazing blogging platform. Now, of course, I am completely biased. I am an investor in Six Apart and have been talking with Mena, Ben, Barak and Andrew about the ideas behind Vox for a couple of years now. But that does not in any way diminish the accomplishments behind Vox. It is a truly phenomenal service.

So what is Vox? Vox is the perfect blogging platform for my family. It is a combination of a really simple, elegant blogging tool and a social network. You can invite people to join your Vox blog and then specify if they are "friends" or "family." With those designations, you can then control who sees what content on your blog. For example, you might post a picture of your baby in the bath and designate it viewable only by "family." Or you might write a post about a recent bachelor party and designate it readable only by "friends." By allowing the granular of control over each piece of content (photos, video, text), you are able to customize the view of your blog for your specific audience members.

So why am I so excited? Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them. I can write about topics I might not otherwise put on the open web. I have the controls I need to use my Vox blog in a very different way than I use my Movable Type blog (VentureBlog) or my TypePad blog (SaysMe). My brother, my sister, my parents, my brother- and sister-in-law, my cousin are all on Vox. I use Vox to share the latest about my life with them and they use Vox to share the latest about their lives with me. Vox is a one-stop shop for staying in touch with my friends and family -- I need go no further than posting on Vox and looking at what they've posted on Vox to stay connected to the people who matter most to me.

I've written about what I called Social Networking 3.0 before. I argued that social networks are not an application in and of themselves but rather help inform other applications. Well Vox is one such application that uses social networking to increase the power of its other features. The ability to specify reader permissioning with greater granularity is a powerful use of social networking. And Vox does a superb job of making that possible.

If you want to check out my Vox blog, click here. What you will see are some fun YouTube videos, discussion of random books and CDs, photos from Yahoo Hack Day, a post about Threat Level Orange, a picture of Mena and her dog in costume, etc. What you won't see is a single picture or video of my kids. Which is funny, because if you are my mom, that's practically all you will see. And that's the beauty of Vox. Everyone sees a clean, well-organized blog that supports all media types, but each view is different based upon your relationship with the author. Which is precisely what I needed in a tool in order to blog about my daily life.

As I said at the outset, I'm biased. But I am also truly addicted to Vox. As are the rest of my family members. For those of you who are interested in checking out Vox for yourselves, as of last week it is open to the public. Just CLICK HERE and you'll be able to sign up for your very own Vox blog and see what everyone is talking about. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Comments

[Lars]

Your family/privacy pitch worked...my son now has his very own blog. Lots of great details of his first tooth, struggles to get crawling and other fun stuff. A great idea from VOX/SixApart.

My only complaint, and it is a big one, is that my family will not sign up for their own blog just to see his. I get the viral adoption bit but it would be far better to just let invited family validate their email invite and get rolling.